National History Day

For many people, the word innovation conjures images of fancy new technologies that we celebrate for compressing time and space. Transportation technologies such as railroads and airplanes served to connect an expanding republic. Similarly, we often praise technological changes in work processes and industrial management, such as factory assembly lines, for lowering the cost of production and the final prices of goods.

Yet, for the workers the impact of technological innovation has been more mixed. New transportation and production technologies expanded markets and lowered costs, but they also increased competition, made many traditional skills obsolete, and pushed workers to develop new ways to fight the growing devaluation of their labor. Therefore, in order to study innovation in history, we must consider both the progress it brought and the challenges it created for workers.