Architecture of Alden B. Dow

History

Sidney K. Robinson

Americas

Wayne State Univ Pr (T)

John Jacob Astor was the best-known and most important American businessman for more than a half-century. His career encompassed the country's formative economic years from the precarious days following the American Revolution to the emergence of an urban-centered manufacturing economy in the late 1840s. Change was the dominant motif of the period, and Astor either exemplified the varied economic, social, and political changes in his business career or he directly affected the course of events. In this biography of John Jacob Astor, John Denis Haeger uses Astor's life and his career as a merchant, fur trader, and land speculator as vehicles for examining several important themes and issues in American economic and urban development between 1790 and 1860. Haeger addresses, in fascinating detail, the complexity of Astor's business endeavors, his extensive connections with the country's dominant political figures, and the "modern" business strategies and managerial techniques that he used to build his business empire. Astor was clearly not a business revolutionary who radically altered an existing system. He was, however, an entrepreneur who exerted a profound change on an industry. He fascinated his contemporaries precisely because he so mirrored his age and its changing business and economic patterns. He grasped the greater size and complexity of an emerging commercial economy in post-Revolutionary America and adopted strategies and structures that transformed the fur and China trades. His investment in city real estate, stocks, bonds, and even a western city made him part of America's evolution into an urbanindustrial society. For his era, John Astor's career was remarkable for its modernity, vision, and reflection of American economic and political values. More than just a personal biography, John Jacob Astor combines economic theories with a fascinating narrative that demonstrates, like no other book has, Astor's impact on the early republic.John Denis Haeger is a professor of history, assistant vice president for research, and dean in the School of Graduate Studies at Central Michigan University. He is a founder and former editor of Michigan Historical Review and the author of The Investment Frontier. Haeger earned his PH.D. from Loyola University in Chicago.

John Jacob Astor: Business and Finance in the Early Republic (Great Lakes Books)

Biographies & Memoirs

John D. Haeger

Historical

A Small Bequest

A Small Bequest is the comic account of two city boys and their summer expedition through Michigan's Upper Peninsula in 1934. What begins as an innocent camping trip becomes a disaster of hilarious proportions for author Ed Love and his best friend, George French.Exploring Grandfather Perry's legacy-two sections of land in the sothwest quadrant of Luce County-the boys are beset by porcupines and poison ivy, blowouts and breakdowns and soon realize that the north woods scrub is no place for Eagle Scouts. Love is a keen observer of the American scene, and A Small Bequest is his witty reminder that all is not beautiful in the wilderness.

Edmund G. Love

In 200 black-and-white photographs, Detroit Images captures another side of Detroit's celebrated renaissance. Reaching beyond the superficial, familiar views of the city's downtown skyscrapers, ethnic restaurants, parades and professional sporting events, the book presents an unsentimental look at a metropolis that once was called "the city of destiny." Detroit has become the nation's symbol of the industrial city in crisis, a synonym for failed public policy and a metaphor for the Rustbelt. Detroit Images depicts the symptoms of that crisis and reflects on its causes and consequences. Historian John Bukowczyk's essay outlines the historical development of industrial Detroit and probes the sources of its decline. The essay by photographer Douglas Aikenhead analyzes the themes and treatments employed by the book's fourteen contributors. In his afterword, poet and Detroit expatriate Philip Levine ponders photographs and personal history to provide a bittersweet commentary on the city. From Poletown to Downriver, Tiger Stadium to the Cass Corridor, Detroit Images mixes harshness, warmth and urban realism into a striking urban social portrait.

Detroit Images: Photographs of the Renaissance City

John J. Bukowczyk

An Afternoon in Waterloo Park evokes feelings, sights, and textures of experience of a bygone period. Prompted by the emotional strain of his mother's death in 1968, Gerald Dumas contemplates three generations of his family and lyrically records impressions of life on Dickerson Avenue in Detroit.This is a complex family story, recollected from the surface of childhood and pondered from the depths of mature experience. Dumas' poetic form allows for closely packed images not possible in prose. What Our Town did in its attempt to find a value for the smallest events of everyday life in early twentieth-century New England, An Afternoon in Waterloo Park achieves for midcentury mid-America-a real and honest evocation of going home.

An Afternoon in Waterloo Park (Great Lakes Books)

Gerald Dumas

Michigan in Literature is a guide to more than one thousand literary and dramatic works set in Michigan from its pre-territorial days to the present. Imaginative, narrative, dramatic, and lyrical creations that have Michigan settings, characters, subjects, and themes are organized into sixteen chapters on topics such as Indians in Michigan, settlers who came to Michigan, diversity in the state, the timber industry, the Great Lakes, crime in Michigan literature, Detroit, and Michigan poetry. 
In this most complete work to date, Clarence Andrews has assembled the literary reputation of a state. He illustrates, with a wide variety of literary works, that Michigan is more than just a builder of automobiles, a producer of apples and cherries, a supplier of copper and lumber, and the home of great athletes. It is also a state that has played-and continues to play-an important role in the production of American literature.
To qualify for inclusion, a work or a significant part of it has to be set in Michigan. Andrews shows how novelists, dramatists, poets, and short story writers have created their particular images of Michigan by using and interpreting the history of the state-its land and waters, people, events, ideas, philosophies, and policies-sometimes factually, sometimes modified or distorted, and sometimes fancied or imagined.
Biographical information is featured about authors, editors, and compilers, who range in fame from Ernest Hemingway and Elmore Leonard to persons long forgotten. The published opinions and judgments of reputable critics and scholars are also presented.

Michigan in Literature (Great Lakes Books)

Literature & Fiction

Clarence A. Andrews

History & Criticism

This book is an account of ships that have borne the name "Queen of the Lakes," an honorary title indicating that, at the time of its launching, a ship is the longest on the Great Lakes. In one of the most comprehensive books ever written on the maritime history of the lakes, Mark Thompson presents a vignette of each of the dozens of ships that has held the title, chronicling the dates the ship sailed, its dimensions, the derivation of its name, its role in the economic development of the region, and its sailing history. Through the stories of the individual ships, Thompson also describes the growth of ship design on the Great Lakes and the changing nature of the shipping industry on the lakes.The launching of the fist ship on Lake Ontario in 1678 -- the diminutive Frontenac, a small, two-masted vessel of only about ten tons and no more than forty or forty-five feet long -- set in motion an evolutionary process that has continued for more than three hundred years. That ship is the direct ancestor of all the ships that ever have operated on the Great Lakes, from the Str. Onoko, launched in February 1882 and the first ship to bear the name Queen of the Lakes; to the Str. W. D. Rees, which held its title only for a few weeks, to today's Queen, the Tregurtha, the longest ship on the lakes since its launching in 1981.Although the ships on the Great Lakes may be surpassed in size and efficiency by many of the modern ocean freighters, Thompson notes that the ships now sailing on the great freshwater seas of North America have achieved a level of operating mastery that is unrivaled anywhere in the world, considering the inherent limitations of the Great Lakes system. The Tregurtha reigns as a model of unsurpassed maritime craftsmanship and as heir to a long and glorious tradition of excellence. Every magnificent ship that has borne the title in the past has contributed in some part to the greatness embodied in the Tregurtha. In time, her title as Queen of the Lakes will pass to another monumental freighter that will carry the art and science of shipbuilding and operation to even greater heights.[Back Cover]The name "Queen" is bestowed upon ships that become, at the time of their launching, the longest ship sailing on the Great Lakes. Queen of the Lakes, perfect for coffee tables, lakefront cabins, and boat lovers' bookshelves, tells the story of each of the ships that has been honored with the title.From the earliest ships launched in the late 1600s; to the "palace steamers" outfitted with stained glass, rare woods, fine carpets, and silk curtains; to today's mammoth ore carriers, Thompson describes each great ship, recalling its dimensions, name derivation, accidents, and sailing history. Ship by ship, era by era, he constructs a chronicle of ship design and the changing role and nature of the shipping industry on the Great Lakes.Queen of the Lakes is a Great Lake Books publication.

Queen of the Lakes (Great Lakes Books)

Mark L. Thompson

Business & Money

Throughout the history of the Great Lakes many organizations have played important roles in the growth and development of the water system. Charting the Inland Seas highlights the work done by the U.S. Lake Survey, one of the most notable, yet least known, organizations in the history of the Great Lakes. 
With the first great influx of settlers into the Great Lakes region came the need for extensive surveys and accurate navigational charts. In the 1830s shipowners and masters pressed the federal government to begin a thorough survey of the Great Lakes in order to make available detailed maps and charts of the various routes by which the lakes could safely be sailed. In 1841, Congress appropriated $15,000 for the Corps of Topographical Engineers to begin a survey of the northern and northwestern lakes, thus marking the formation of the United States Lake Survey. 
Arthur M. Woodford documents how the role and responsibility of the Lake Survey grew as conditions on the Great Lakes changed over the next 135 years. Great Lakes ships evolved into larger vessels with greater drafts, creating the need for new and more exact surveys and charts. In order to more accurately predict the water levels of the Great Lakes, special forecasting techniques evolved. When erosion of beaches threatened to destroy valuable lakefront property, extensive studies by the Lake Survey determined the causes. And as the number of recreational crafts increased, a program began for the design and publication of large scale book charts for boaters to use. In addition, the U.S. Lake Survey was one of the military's major suppliers of maps and charts during the two world wars and the Korean conflict.
In 1970 the federal government established the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as part of the Department of Commerce, and brought together, in a single agency, the major federal programs dealing with the seas and the atmosphere, and the U.S. Lake Survey was reorganized. In 1976, the U.S. Lake Survey was completely phased out, concluding an important chapter in the history of the Great Lakes.

Charting the Inland Seas: A History of the U.S. Lake Survey (Great Lakes Books)

Science & Math

Arthur M. Woodford

Earth Sciences

A listings guide featuring museums, historic sites, science and and nature centres, parks, sporting events, and numerous other ways for children and young people (and their families) to burn off energy in the state of Michigan.

Kids Catalog of Michigan Adventures (Great Lakes Books)

Ellyce Field

The Car and the Camera: The Detroit School of Automotive Photography

Celebrating Detroit car photographers or "shooters" who created new ways of shooting-and seeing-automobiles from the 1950s through the 1990s, The Car and the Camera takes readers on a revealing visual journey. This lavishly illustrated catalogue examines the technological advances in photography that have affected automotive advertisements and traces the fascinating development of the Detroit school of automotive photography, highlighting major photographers such as Walter Farynk, Dennis Gripentrog, Vern Hammarlund, Mickey McGuire, Guy Morrison, Jim Northmore, and Warren O. Winstanley, and their work. The book also explores the ways in which the automotive industry and auto advertisements act as barometers of American culture, both mirroring and helping to shape the spirit of the time.

David Lanier Lewis

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Books by Wayne State Univ Pr (T)