Forgotten Iron King of the Great Lakes
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€40.99
A01=Michael W. Nagle
Author_Michael W. Nagle
bad husband
baron
Category=KJ
Category=KJH
Category=NH
Category=NHB
Chicago
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ludington
Marine City
Michigan
Milwaukee
New Manifest Destiny
nineteenth-century
railroads
shipping
slavery
St. Louis
Product details
- ISBN 9780814349939
- Weight: 336g
- Dimensions: 157 x 218mm
- Publication Date: 08 Nov 2022
- Publisher: Wayne State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Eber Brock Ward (1811–1875) began his career as a cabin boy on his uncle's sailing vessels, but when he died in 1875, he was the wealthiest man in Michigan. His business activities were vast and innovative. Ward was engaged in the steamboat, railroad, lumber, mining, and iron and steel industries. In 1864, his facility near Detroit became the first in the nation to produce steel using the more efficient Bessemer method. Michael W. Nagle demonstrates how much of Ward's success was due to his ability to vertically integrate his business operations, which were undertaken decades before other more famous moguls, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. And yet, despite his countless successes, Ward's life was filled with ruthless competition, labor conflict, familial dispute, and scandal. Nagle makes extensive use of Ward's correspondence, business records, contemporary newspaper accounts, and other archival material to craft a balanced profile of this fascinating figure whose actions influenced the history and culture of the Great Lakes and beyond.
Michael W. Nagle is a professor of history and political science at West Shore Community College. He is the author of Justus S. Stearns: Michigan Pine King and Kentucky Coal Baron, 1845–1933 (Wayne State University Press, 2015), which won the Kentucky History Award. Nagle lives in Ludington, Michigan.
