Eyes glaze over. End of conversation.
People often have a hard time figuring out the attraction of industrial sites for some historians.
Many look at industrial complexes as blights on the landscape, perhaps necessary, but ugly all the same. For better or worse, however, for much of its history the United States has had an industrial-based economy, and that fact is largely responsible for its prominence in the world today. What industrial archeologists do is study the physical remains of industry in an effort to understand both technological processes and changes in those processes over time, as well as the history of how things have been made and how people have performed work over the years. An understanding of industrial history is vital to an understanding of the larger history of the country. Interest in the subject began in Britain, the cradle and crucible of the Industrial Revolution.