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This article explores the demise of the Crompton Company, which filed for bankruptcy in October 1984, causing 2,450 workers in five states to lose their jobs. Crompton was founded in 1807 in Providence, Rhode Island and when it went out of business it was the oldest textile firm in the country, having been in continuous operation for 178 years. Despite its history, scholars have overlooked Crompton, partly because most work on deindustrialization has concentrated on heavy manufacturing industries, especially steel and automobiles. I argue that Crompton's demise throws much light on the broader decline of the American textile and apparel industry, which has lost over two million jobs since the mid-1970s, and shows that textiles deserve a more central place in the literature. Using company papers, this study shows that imports played the central role in causing Crompton's decline, although there were also other problems, including the strong dollar, declining exports, and a reluctance to diversify, which contributed to it. The paper also explores broader trends, including the earlier flight of the industry from New England to the South and the industry's unsuccessful campaign to pass import-restriction legislation, a fight in which Crompton's managers were very involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Offers an approach to 'self' as a historical subject in New England. Discussions on selfhood and identity; Emphasis on the sociological meaning of self between the Revolution and the Civil War; Indication of conceptions on self through the pervasiveness of the vocabulary.

Discusses the uprooting of people from ancestral ways and places as a prerequisite of modernization. Investigations of domestic and international migration in New England; Examples of early-modern mobility studies; Extent of colonial rerooting; Traditionalist motives for crossing the Atlantic; Vitality of early modern migration studies; Trauma of uprooting and transatlantic relocation.