Coal Age Empire: Pennsylvania Coal and Its Utilization to 1860 (review)

book reviews367 it does greatly enhance their understanding of the photographs made of the battlefield. The author has studied all available photographs taken on the field from 1863 through 1866, reproducing about half of them in his book. He has attempted to determine the identity of the photographers, the dates of their picture-taking and the specific locales depicted. Each of these objectives presented difficulties but the latter offered the greatest challenge. To meet it, Frassanito has painstakingly searched for distinctive rocks and other surviving features which appeared in the original photographs . He has thereby succeeded in locating the sites of most of the photographs, in plotting them on detailed maps, and in presenting modern photographs of the same scenes. He is able to prove that several oft-reproduced pictures have been previously inaccurately captioned as to locale and subject matter. He demonstrates that those of dead bodies sometimes include the same corpses photographed from different angles and occasionally show living men shamming death. All in all, he gives readers a much better idea of how Gettysburg appeared both to participants and photographers . Of more general interest to historians is Frassanito's exemplification of how to derive maximum meaning from early photographs. He shows how to make a detailed examination of any related set of pictures in their historical and physical context. By doing likewise , historians could learn more about how other places and events looked to contemporaries. The book's physical appearance is generally up to the standard of its content but readers should be sure to get the separate errata sheet which corrects four confusing errors. Students of Gettysburg and of history in general will find value in the yield of Frassanito's labor. Frank L. Byrne Kent State University Coal Age Empire: Pennsylvania Coal and Its Utilization to 1860. By Frederick Moore Binder. (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1974. Pp 184. $5.50.) In 1972 Alfred Chandler put forth the thesis that Pennsylvania anthracite was responsible for the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. He said that more research needed to be done on this subject. Binder's book fills the need for more information in this area. As noted by Binder, Pennsylvania anthracite became the major fuel for northeastern United States from 1830 to 1860 and was shipped as far west as Chicago and south to New Orleans and many Latin American ports. Several shiploads were even taken to the Orient and to Europe. Pennsylvania bituminous, on the other hand, served as a major fuel for developing industry in the western part of the Commonwealth and made its way down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to such growing cities as Cincinnati, St. Louis, and New Orleans and went north into the Great Lakes region to Cleveland, Detroit , Chicago, and western New York State. While the geographical distribution and marketing of Pennsylvania coal receives considerable space, most of Binder's analysis treats technological problems. Great Britain had burned both types of fuel for more than a century, and Americans were quick to adapt that country's technology as in the case of the hot blast for making anthracite iron. Binder spends one chapter each on technological and marketing problems in order to introduce Pennsylvania coal into the hearth and home, for making gas light, and as a fuel for steam vessels, locomotives, the iron industry, and a number of other industries . For example, most of the bituminous in western Pennsylvania during the 1820's helped produce salt through the evaporation of salt water, and soft coal could easily be converted into gas for lighting such cities as Baltimore. Anthracite became the chief fuel for heating homes, cooking, producing iron, and propelling steamboats and locomotives in the East. It is interesting to note that the Reading Railroad burned wood in its locomotives in the 1840's until the technological problem of burning anthracite was solved while at the same time it hauled the greatest amount of hard coal to market and carried a total tonnage which exceeded the next carrier of tonnage in the United States, the Erie Canal. Frederick Binder has done extensive research for Coal Age Empire , and the book is well...