HORSES AT WORK; Harnessing Power in Industrial America by Greene, Ann Norton - 2008

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Hardcover. Very Good+. 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 322 pgs, b&w historical photos, notes, index. Historians have long assumed that new industrial machines and power sources eliminated work animals from nineteenth-century America, yet a bird's-eye view of nineteenth-century society would show millions of horses supplying the energy necessary for industrial development. Horses were ubiquitous in cities and on farms, providing power for transportation, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture. On Civil War battlefields, thousands of horses labored and died for the Union and the Confederacy hauling wagons and mechanized weaponry.The innovations that brought machinery to the forefront of American society made horses the prime movers of these machines for most of the nineteenth century.