Empire Builders
Empire Builders

Author: Lauren R. Pacini

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0253069831

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Empire Builders tells the story of Oris P. and Mantis J. Sweringen, two brothers from Wooster, Ohio, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although they were born into abject poverty, Oris was an extraordinary visionary who, with the help of his devoted younger brother, amassed a vast fortune in real estate and railroad developments. Their major breakthrough came in 1913 with the establishment of Shaker Heights, an affluent garden suburb connected by a brand-new interurban railroad to the booming midwestern metropolis of Cleveland. The Van Sweringens' ascension after Shaker Heights was meteoric, and it culminated with the construction of the 52-story Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland in 1927. However, the country's economy came crashing down after the 1929 stock market collapse, and their empire crumbled around them. Empire Builders is the first new biography of the Van Sweringen brothers in more than twenty years. In it, architectural photographer and local history author Lauren R. Pacini tells the remarkable story of the Van Sweringen brothers through words and images. This richly illustrated volume features more than 150 new photographs of the still-fabulous historic homes the brothers built throughout greater Cleveland. The foreword is written by John J. Grabowski.

New World, Inc.
New World, Inc.

Author: John Butman

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2018-03-20

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 0316307874

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Three generations of English merchant adventurers-not the Pilgrims, as we have so long believed-were the earliest founders of America. Profit-not piety-was their primary motive. Some seventy years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed "The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown," the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-sixteenth century, England was a small and relatively insignificant kingdom on the periphery of Europe, and it had begun to face a daunting array of social, commercial, and political problems. Struggling with a single export-woolen cloth-the merchants were forced to seek new markets and trading partners, especially as political discord followed the straitened circumstances in which so many English people found themselves. At first they headed east, and dreamed of Cathay-China, with its silks and exotic luxuries. Eventually, they turned west, and so began a new chapter in world history. The work of reaching the New World required the very latest in navigational science as well as an extraordinary appetite for risk. As this absorbing account shows, innovation and risk-taking were at the heart of the settlement of America, as was the profit motive. Trade and business drove English interest in America, and determined what happened once their ships reached the New World. The result of extensive archival work and a bold interpretation of the historical record, New World, Inc. draws a portrait of life in London, on the Atlantic, and across the New World that offers a fresh analysis of the founding of American history. In the tradition of the best works of history that make us reconsider the past and better understand the present, Butman and Targett examine the enterprising spirit that inspired European settlement of America and established a national culture of entrepreneurship and innovation that continues to this day.