How was this important? “If we had a lot more information about this time period, the shoe industry and the history of how a pair was made could be of interest to historians,” he said. “We’d do a better job of telling a story of the shoe industry, and the importance that was placed on the type of shoes they wore.”
The University of Minnesota also published a series of articles on these shoes from the 1920s, titled An Historical Look on the Early Production and Wear of New British Shoes, and a more detailed review of the research was conducted by the university in a special issue of the journal Studies on the Historical Use of the English Language.
But there are also a number of other historical accounts of shoes from that era. And in fact, shoemakers didn’t stop making shoes after they left the factories and factories stopped being built until around 1920.
To get more information on the shoes of the 1920s, we turned to Dr. Peter J. F. Sjöqvist, the editor of Oxford Journals in the History of Society. Dr. Sjöqvist wrote that during the 1920s, the shoe industry in Sweden was doing “really well.” As a shoe manufacturer of low-cost shoes, Sjöqvist said he was “quite proud of the fact that no Swedish worker made shoes for export until after 1940.”
It wasn’t until the 1970s, when the U.S. began trying to re-shape its shoe industry, that that shoe industry began to crumble. In the 1940s, “shoe factories could easily absorb workers at the entry of these companies. But as these giants collapsed in the 1970s, they lost many of their workers, leaving them struggling to pay their rent,” Sjöqvist wrote in the journal.
Another study looked at the history of American shoes, beginning in 1909 with the publication of “The Manufacture of Fashion.” This book is an overview of American shoe making. The author was John S. W. Safford, director of the Department of Industrial and Mechanical History at Michigan State and professor emeritus at North Carolina State University. He is author of “The Art and Science of Shoes”: Its History, Production, Pattern and Techniques.
His article pointed out how “American footwear development had long been the result of what we consider our national heritage.” Safford noted that “the development of American shoes began in the early ’30s … with a number of shoes that were produced mainly
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