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The life of I. J. 'Izzi' Wagner mirrors the development of Salt Lake City during the twentieth century—from poverty and obscurity to affluence and prominence. Wagner was born in poverty, but through hard work, wise management, and good luck, he built a fortune. He also changed the city for the better—leading the movement to eliminate overhead signs on Main Street, opening the southwest quadrant to controlled industrial development, ridding the city center of railroad tracks, funding the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts, and using his substantial influence to promote tolerance.

His sense of humor was legendary. His tenacity in pursuit of goals was unwavering. His grasp of past, present, and future opportunities was profound. Bags to Riches shows the personal side of an 'outsider' who became an 'insider' through congeniality, good humor, and integrity.

Sharp, resourceful, and with a style all her own, Althea Altemus embodied the spirit of the independent working woman of the Jazz Age. In her memoir, Big Bosses, she vividly recounts her life as a secretary for prominent (but thinly disguised) employers in Chicago, Miami, and New York during the late teens and 1920s. Alongside her we rub elbows with movie stars, artists, and high-profile businessmen, and experience lavish estate parties that routinely defied the laws of Prohibition.

Beginning with her employment as a private secretary to James Deering of International Harvester, whom she describes as “probably the world’s oldest and wealthiest bachelor playboy,” Altemus tells us much about high society during the time, taking us inside Deering’s glamorous Miami estate, Vizcaya, an Italianate mansion worthy of Gatsby himself. Later, we meet her other notable employers, including Samuel Insull, president of Chicago Edison; New York banker S. W. Straus; and real estate developer Fred F. French. We cinch up our trenchcoats and head out sleuthing in Chicago, hired by the wife of a big boss to find out how he spends his evenings (with, it turns out, a mistress hidden in an apartment within his office, no less). Altemus was also a struggling single mother, a fact she had to keep secret from her employers, and she reveals the difficulties of being a working woman at the time through glimpses into women’s apartments, their friendships, and the dangers—sexual and otherwise—that she and others faced. Throughout, Altemus entertains with a tart and self-aware voice that combines the knowledge of an insider with the wit and clarity of someone on the fringe.

Anchored by extensive annotation and an afterword from historian Robin F. Bachin, which contextualizes Altemus’s narrative, Big Bosses provides a one-of-a-kind peek inside the excitement, extravagances, and the challenges of being a working woman roaring through the ’20s.

Praise for the first edition:

"A fascinating book [and] a sympathetic look at the man who glued General Motors together and in the process made Flint one of the great industrial centers of America."
---Detroit Free Press

"It is refreshing to report that Billy Durant is one of the best researched books dealing with an automotive giant."
---Antique Automobile

"Billy Durant fills in a masterly way the only important void remaining concerning the work of the motorcar pioneers."
---Richard Crabb, author of Birth of a Giant: The Men and Incidents That Gave America the Motorcar

What explains Billy Durant's powerful influence on the auto industry during its early days? And why, given Durant's impact, has he been nearly forgotten for decades?

In search of answers to these questions, Lawrence Gustin interviewed Durant's widow, who provided a wealth of previously unpublished autobiographical notes, letters, and personal papers. Gustin also interviewed two of Durant's personal secretaries and others who had known and worked with the man who created General Motors. The result is the amazing account of the mastermind behind what would become, as the twentieth century progressed, the world's largest company.

Binga is the definitive full-length biography of Jesse Binga, the first black banker in Chicago. Born into a large family in Detroit, Binga arrived in Chicago in 1892 in his late twenties with virtually nothing. Through his wits and resourcefulness, he rose to wealth and influence as a real estate broker, and in 1908 he founded the Binga Bank, the first black-owned bank in the city. But his achievements were followed by an equally notable downfall. Binga recounts this gripping story about race, history, politics, and finance.

The Black Belt, where Binga’s bank was located, was a segregated neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side—a burgeoning city within a city—and its growth can be traced through the arc of Binga’s career. He preached and embodied an American gospel of self-help and accrued wealth while expanding housing options and business opportunities for blacks. Devout Roman Catholics, he and his wife Eudora supported church activities and various cultural and artistic organizations; their annual Christmas party was the Black Belt’s social event of the year. But Binga’s success came at the price of a vicious backlash. After he moved his family into a white neighborhood in 1917, their house was bombed multiple times, his offices were attacked twice, and he became a lightning rod for the worst race riots in Chicago history, which took place in 1919. Binga persevered, but, starting with the stock market crash of October 1929, a string of reversals cost him his bank, his property, and his fortune.

A quintessentially Chicago story, Binga tells the history of racial change in one of the most segregated cities in America and how an extraordinary man stood as a symbol of hope in a community isolated by racial animosity.

Bonds of Enterprise uses the life of railroad entrepreneur John Murray Forbes to explore the shift from antebellum merchant capitalism to late ninetieth-century corporate capitalism, the rise of big business, technological innovations, farmer agitation for railroad rate control, and the process of government regulations. Forbes started off his business life as a China trader in the 1830s, returned to the States in time to surmount the Panic of 1837, and then—deciding that railroad construction should be based on existing settlement and traffic systems rather than speculative ambitions—became a master builder, beginning with the Michigan Central Railroad and ending with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy system and the growth of Chicago as a railroad hub. Focusing on Forbes’s life allows Larson to elaborate on the contest of wills between eastern capitalists and Midwestern boosters and the complex patterns of regional growth, particularly in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and Nebraska.

For the first 150 years of their existence, “natural foods” were consumed primarily by body builders, hippies, religious sects, and believers in nature cure. And those consumers were dismissed by the medical establishment and food producers as kooks, faddists, and dangerous quacks. In the 1980s, broader support for natural foods took hold and the past fifteen years have seen an explosion—everything from healthy-eating superstores to mainstream institutions like hospitals, schools, and workplace cafeterias advertising their fresh-from-the-garden ingredients.

Building Nature’s Market shows how the meaning of natural foods was transformed as they changed from a culturally marginal, religiously inspired set of ideas and practices valorizing asceticism to a bohemian lifestyle to a mainstream consumer choice. Laura J. Miller argues that the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the leadership of the natural foods industry. Rather than a simple tale of cooptation by market forces, Miller contends the participation of business interests encouraged the natural foods movement to be guided by a radical skepticism of established cultural authority. She challenges assumptions that private enterprise is always aligned with social elites, instead arguing that profit-minded entities can make common cause with and even lead citizens in advocating for broad-based social and cultural change.

Goes beyond institutional history to concentrate on commercial and social matters

The author’s findings imply that Jewish immigrants to the South in the first half of the 19th century came from particular locales with similar social, economic, and religious backgrounds, and they chose to live in the South because of those traditions. The experience of Jews with commercial capitalism, rather than landowning, in agricultural societies, gave the Jews of Louisiana a comparable niche in America, and they participated in the commercial aspects of a regional economy based on agricultural production. Commercial and family connections with other Jewish groups facilitated their development into a settled community. In growth and decline, Jewish communities in Louisiana and elsewhere became permanent features of the landscape and influenced, and were influenced, by the areas in which they lived.