An­drew Popp

Jo­si­ah Wedg­wood is one of the most famed and il­lus­tri­ous en­tre­pren­eurs con­nec­ted to the first In­dus­tri­al Re­volu­tion that took place in Bri­tain in the eight­eenth-cen­tury. He has been writ­ten about ex­tens­ively and au­thors have of­ten drawn on his co­pi­ous cor­res­pond­ence. How­ever, there is no work ded­ic­ated to the in­tel­lec­tu­al bio­graphy of this very im­port­ant thinker. This pro­ject ex­plores the con­tem­por­ary cur­rents that fed into Wedg­wood’s think­ing, the in­tel­lec­tu­al con­tri­bu­tions that he him­self made, and – most im­port­antly – how thought and ac­tion were linked and ex­pressed through his en­t­pren­eur­i­al en­deav­ours

In con­trast to Jo­si­ah Wedg­wood, Florence and Ray Miller were “nobod­ies,” quietly liv­ing out their lives in east­ern Ohio across the first eight dec­ades of the twen­ti­eth-cen­tury. This pro­ject, again based on cor­res­pond­ence, traces out the lives Florence and Ray built to­geth­er in the con­text of Amer­ic­an cap­it­al­ism.