Press Release

For Immediate Release
Contact: Ken Durr
February 11, 2002
E-mail: kdurr@historyassociates.com

History Associates Incorporated Completes New History of the National Electrical Contractors Association

A new book written by History Associates Incorporated (HAI) of Rockville, Maryland, and published by the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) promises to be a landmark history of the electrical, construction, and telecommunications industries. Empowering an Industry: One Hundred Years of the National Electrical Contractors Association is the engaging story of the men and women who wired America from the earliest days of the incandescent bulb to the computer age. It was Thomas Edison who recognized that his light bulb and the developing power grid all depended on a cadre of skilled technicians. NECA's founding at the wondrously illuminated Pan American Exhibition in Buffalo in1901 was a recognition of this insight. The group was determined to empower the electrical contractors who in turn empowered the American electrical industry. In a work that combines exhaustive research and documentation with solid storytelling skills, HAI senior historian Kathleen J. Nawyn recounts how NECA contractors organized, built an industry, and oversaw the repeated transformation of that industry. Along the way NECA grappled with labor unions, equal opportunity and affirmative action laws, and new technologies such as fiber optics. The book acknowledges that the contractors association was sometimes all-too-human in its reluctance to change. Yet NECA ultimately engaged these new challenges, just as it had engaged others in earlier times.

HAI has provided business, government, and nonprofit clients with professional historical research, writing, archives, and records management services for more than twenty years. Empowering an Industry reminds us that flick-of-the-switch power, light, and communications don't just happen. In technology, as in history, it takes professionals to make it look easy. For more information call or visit www.historyassociates.com.