Written to accompany an exhibition of prints from the John P. Eckblad collection of industrial imagery, At the Heart of Progress explores the way that artists have looked at the world that was created by heavy industry over more than two centuries. An interlocking triad — the mining of coal, the production of iron and steel, and the development of steam power — formed the basis of modern industrial civilization, explains curator Timothy Riggs. This transformation of the world is presented in a wide variety of images: documentary views, advertising and political posters, and works of art by artists including Camille Pissarro, Joseph Pennell, and C. R. W. Nevinson.

The volume offers a detailed discussion of twenty-nine key prints and traces the growth and transformation of heavy industry in Britain, France, and America. At the Heart of Progress shows how artists confronted the new industrial structures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then focuses on the artistic representation of the industrial environment and the portrayal of the worker in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the industrial landscape engulfed whole tracts of countryside and a new society of industrial laborers developed.