About

Mark Hendrickson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His recent publications explore how American mining engineers and economic geologists working abroad since the 1880s helped shape the development of 20th-century American capitalism, science, and foreign policy. He is currently working on a book that uses the element antimony to examine these issues further. Hendrickson recently held an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, which provided him with the opportunity to study aspects of the mining industry with scholars at Colorado School of Mines and Michigan Technological University.

Research topics

• Engineering
• Macroeconomics
• Economics

Selected publications

• Engineering Knowledge and the Emergence of China as a Global Leader in Antimony Production

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2025-11-11

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The American [antimony] market was largely controlled from London prior to the war, but now the Chinese and Japanese brands have become so firmly established, our market is hardly likely to return to the dominance of British firms.-Minerals Resources of the United States, 1918, 35 [Chinese antimony producers] have erected several plants which are the last word in manufacturing methods.The profits they are making enable them to engage the best talent in the world and to install any new device the moment it is known.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Deconstructing the Monolith: The Microeconomics of the National Industrial Recovery Act

  Journal of American History · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Macroeconomics
  • Engineering

  In Deconstructing the Monolith the economist Jason E. Taylor provides a microeconomic history of the National Industrial Recovery Act (Nira) that shifts attention away from macroeconomic questions—Did the Nira prolong the Great Depression? What impact did it have on unemployment and inflation?—and toward the actual operation of Nira codes on firm and industry levels. Taylor argues that in the two years of its existence between June 1933 and May 1935, the “effects of the Nira varied dramatically by both industry and time period” (p. 173). This analysis reveals the importance of considering both the specifics of each code (particularly related to labor and trade practice provisions and compliance), which varied widely, and the timing of the passage and implementation of specific codes. Taylor begins by acknowledging that the origins of Nira codes can be traced to the 1920s when Secretary of Commerce (and future president) Herbert Hoover experimented with ways of using an associational state model of public policy to curb wasteful competition, increase the purchasing power of workers, and spread out scarce work.

  PublisherDOI

• Advance agent of expanding empires: George F. Becker and mineral exploration in South Africa and the Philippines

  History and Technology · 2019-07-03 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the late nineteenth century, American mining engineers and geologists fanned out to potential or existing mines around the world. This paper examines the work of George F. Becker—a forty-year veteran of the United States Geological Survey—in South Africa and the Philippines during the 1890s. Becker’s work on the world above and below ground provided a diverse audience with direct observations of attempted empire building underway and helped to reorganize the world of American imperial imagination in a way that used British experience in South Africa to explain and justify U.S. efforts to displace Spain in the Philippines. He derived his authority both from the knowledge he generated about minerals and geological formations underground and from the experience he garnered as one of the only Americans to observe these two empire building projects underway on two continents in this critical period of economic, political and foreign policy upheaval.

  PublisherDOI

• “In Time of Stress, a Civilization Pauses to Take Stock of Itself”: Adolf A. Berle and the Modern Corporation from the New Era to 1933

  Seattle University law review · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This Article demonstrates three things. First, an examination of Berle’s work and thinking in this critical period reveals the ways in which public problems and the need to “know capitalism,” to borrow a phrase from Mary Furner, converged in the post-WWI era in remarkable and unprecedented ways that would shape New Deal and post-New Deal politics and policy. Berle’s gift for synthesizing evidence and constructing narratives that explained complex events were particularly well suited to this era that prized the expert. Second, identifying a problem and developing a persuasive narrative is one thing, but finding solutions is another. Berle joined in a collective effort to “grope”—to use a term he employed often—for new ways of ordering the relationship between the state, shareholders, managers, workers, and the corporation. In a related and third point, a close examination of this critical period in Berle’s intellectual development helps us to better understand Berle’s embrace of the corporation as a progressive and stabilizing force in the post-WWII era. The Berle of the pre-New Deal period was ideologically predisposed to more associational—rather than statist—solutions to public problems. As the Great Depression took hold, Berle recognized the necessity of government taking on new powers, but his correspondence and writings prior to the Roosevelt administration reveal someone never at ease with precisely how the state should regulate the corporation. When post-WWII concerns about the inevitable return to the Great Depression failed to materialize, Berle returned to this more associational approach and celebrated the ensuing prosperity as a victory for now socially responsible corporate managers who had taken the lessons of the Great Depression to heart.

  Publisher

• Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area

  History Reviews of New Books · 2019-09-12 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area." History: Reviews of New Books, 47(6), pp. 161–162

  PublisherDOI

• DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING AN AGE-FRIENDLY UNIVERSITY (AFU) AUDIT

  Innovation in Aging · 2018-11-01

  articleOpen access

  UMass Boston endorsed the AFU principles in 2017. Working with Bridges Together, a nonprofit focused on intergenerational engagement, a workgroup was convened in 2018 to operationalize the 10 principles with the goal of designing an audit tool and then piloting the tool. The workgroup consisted of 10 stakeholders across departments and academic levels including members of the lifelong learning institute and alumni. The workgroup received 7 hours of training on intergenerational theory and practice; application to AFU principles; and data collection techniques. Over 100 indicators were generated to demonstrate the principles. The indicators were assessed through document review, interviews with key informants such as the Registrar, Career Counseling, Advising, Communications, Student Life, and Health & Wellness Services; and photo evidence. Preliminary findings reveal where the campus is achieving elements of age-friendliness and where challenges remain. The tool will be refined and then available as a resource for other campuses.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lynn Dumenil. The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I; Elizabeth Cobbs. The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers.

  The American Historical Review · 2018-09-05

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The United States may have been actively engaged in World War I for only nineteen months, but the conflict had an outsized effect on American life. When the nation entered the war in April 1917, industry partially converted to wartime production, stimulating demand for labor at the same time that immigration plummeted, and the American military increased the number of troops from less than two hundred thousand to almost three million. The demands of mobilization invigorated new and existing institutions that often linked support or opposition to the war effort to their own agendas. When President Woodrow Wilson framed the war as an effort to make the world safe for democracy, many others appropriated that language to demand a measure of democracy in their workplaces, ballot boxes, homes, and beyond. It is in this tumultuous and contingent moment that Lynn Dumenil and Elizabeth Cobbs deliberate not just on what American women did during the war, but on how their actions in this critical period shaped their own lives and society in the years and decades after the war.

  PublisherDOI

• “THE SESAME THAT OPENS THE DOOR OF TRADE:” JOHN HAYS HAMMOND AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT IN MINING, 1880–1920

  The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era · 2017-06-23 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the last decades of the nineteenth century, American mining engineers fanned out around the globe to potential or existing mines in China, Mexico, Siberia, South Africa, and beyond. This article examines the rise and work of mining engineer John Hays Hammond and the mining engineers, geologists, and capitalists with whom he worked. The paper reveals ways that a segment of the investor class depended upon members of the emerging professional middle class of university-trained mining experts for collaboration—and even inspiration—regarding possible sources of remunerative investment. The search for raw materials abroad opens up a chapter in the history of U.S. capitalism in which mining engineers like Hammond encouraged and facilitated a new phase of export of redundant U.S. capital and manufactured goods in a direction where investment would be secure, labor recruitable, and profits attractive and subject to repatriation. Filling in this vital narrative makes an essential contribution to the ongoing recovery of the history of the U.S. and world capitalism in the era of rapid industrialization.

  PublisherDOI

• Goldstene, Claire<b>The Struggle for America's Promise: Equal Opportunity at the Dawn of Corporate Capital</b>

  History Reviews of New Books · 2016-05-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "Goldstene, Claire The Struggle for America's Promise: Equal Opportunity at the Dawn of Corporate Capital." History: Reviews of New Books, 44(4), pp. 101–102

  PublisherDOI

• Host country responses to HIV-infected black african migrants and refugees (no public version)

  2014-01-01

  article
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Derek Brown

  2 shared

• Andrea Weaver

  Together

  2 shared

• J.K. Green

  2 shared

• Christa Fouché

  University of Auckland

  2 shared

• Kay Scott

  St. John's Riverside Hospital

  2 shared

• Lauren Marshall Bowen

  Boston University

  1 shared

• Cynthia Pointdexter

  1 shared

• Nina M. Silverstein

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship