American Literature / Unit 9 AML 0823 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Rebecca Harding Davis and "Life in the Iron-Mills"
Captions available
The idea
Published in eighteen sixty-one, "Life in the Iron-Mills" takes a reader into a mill town's smoke and follows a furnace worker who carves figures from slag. It is among the first American fictions to treat industrial labour seriously.
In practice
A furnace, and a sculpture made of slag.
Where people slip
It predates realism and reads like it.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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