The Voice of Industry

voice of industry cover

Early American labor magazine adopted by the (mostly women) textile workers of Lowell, Massachusetts. The magazine demonstrates workers' resistance to the development of American industry/capitalism, which the contributors to the magazine often described as wage-slavery. The Voice of Industry ran from 1845 to 1848, changing its name to the New Era of Industry starting on 2 June 1848.

Issues are taken and transcribed from the Internet Archive. See also the Industrial Revolution website for further transcriptions of content in the Voice.

Submitted by adri on July 11, 2023

Comments

adri

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by adri on July 11, 2023

I hope it's ok if I started this. I was planning on uploading all the issues and transcribing some of the more interesting content. The industrialrevolution website has already transcribed some articles, but there is still quite a lot of content that is worth transcribing or making more accessible.

Submitted by Steven. on July 11, 2023

adri wrote: I hope it's ok if I started this. I was planning on uploading all the issues and transcribing some of the more interesting content. The industrialrevolution website has already transcribed some articles, but there is still quite a lot of content that is worth transcribing or making more accessible.

This is more than okay, this is fantastic! Really look forward to seeing more of it

Steven.

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on July 11, 2023

Just a small note, but if they have issue numbers, it would probably be better to have the issue number in the title rather than the date. This should mean they automatically sort in the correct order, and it will also avoid any lack of clarity with the date, given differences in US/UK date formats

adri

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by adri on July 12, 2023

Will do, some of the writing in the Voice is actually quite impressive, and still relevant as ever,

Things Lost Forever. Lost wealth may be restored by industry: the wreck of health regained by temperance: forgotten knowledge restored by study: alienated friendship smoothed into forgetfulness: even forfeited reputation won by penitence and virtue. But who ever again looked upon his vanished hours—recalled his slighted years—stamped them with wisdom, or effaced from Heaven’s record the fearful blot of wasted life?

adri

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by adri on July 12, 2023

Is issue number plus date fine for the titles/file names? That should make it where it sorts properly in file managers etc.

Steven.

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on July 12, 2023

That new format looks great, thanks! Look forward to reading more

adri

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by adri on July 12, 2023

Cheers, I've also fixed the quote above that appears in the Vol. 1 No. 30 issue... It seems the industrialrevolution site I took it from has a few transcribing errors ("soothed" instead of "smoothed," "on" instead of "won").

Steven.

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on July 13, 2023

Just one small point, if the issue numbers go into double digits, then if you want them to sort in order automatically, singledigit issue numbers you will need to put in double-digit format, e.g. 01 (Otherwise, 19 for example will appear above 3). You can leave them as they are and rearrange them manually afterwards, but I think probably easier to just use double digits

adri

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by adri on July 13, 2023

Done!

Steven.

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on July 14, 2023

Great, cheers

adri

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by adri on July 20, 2023

I'm probably going to switch to the issues that are on the Internet Archive. It seems they're much higher quality, though they do add around ~15 mb.

Aunty

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by Aunty on July 23, 2023

Hallo. I’d like to help transcribe these famous journals, with an eye to the entire corpus being exactly rendered in text. The machine transcriptions on archive.org are unreadable, as are the damaged microfilm images. How might I help here? I don’t see a way to collectively edit.

adri

1 year 5 months ago

Submitted by adri on July 23, 2023

Hiya, I was really only planning on typing out some of the more interesting content (i.e. articles that capture workers' views on the emerging factory system, as well as other content that's of general historical interest). There is some stuff in the Voice that I doubt most people really care about (e.g. advertisements, the marriage column, reprinted novels, etc...). If you, or anyone else, really want to help find and transcribe such content, it would probably be best to use some kind of collaboration/instant messaging software, just so that we're all on the same page editing-wise.