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Over a forty-year career, Chicagoan Tom Burrell changed the face of advertising and revolutionized the industry’s approach to African Americans as human beings and consumers. Jason P. Chambers offers a biography of the groundbreaking creator and entrepreneur that explores Burrell’s role in building brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola within a deeply felt vision of folding positive images of Black people into mainstream American life. While detailing Burrell’s successes, Chambers tells a parallel story of what Burrell tried to do that sheds light on the motivations of advertising creators who viewed their work as being about more than just selling. Chambers also highlights how Burrell used his entrepreneurial gifts to build an agency that opened the door for Black artists, copywriters, directors, and other professionals to earn livings, build careers, and become leaders within the industry.

Compelling and multidimensional, Advertising Revolutionary combines archival research and interviews with Burrell and his colleagues to provide a long overdue portrait of an advertising industry legend and his times.

An advantageous location and entrepreneurial passion helped fuel Chicago’s transformation from a fur trading post to a thriving city. Louis P. Cain’s economic history places pre-1871 Chicago within the narrative of national expansion and examines infrastructure, finance, and other areas of city life. Business histories tell the story of fortunes made with essential products like meat and grain. Sketches of titans like William Ogden and Cyrus McCormick reveal how real estate, farm equipment, and other industries became engines of local growth. Cain also details public health improvements that made Lake Michigan safe as a water supply while census data informs a portrait of Chicago’s population and the lives of the free Blacks and Irish immigrants at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Panoramic and up to date, Chicago before the Fire looks at how an intersection of geography, vision, and investment built a great American city.

In the 1940s Henry J. Kaiser was a household name, as familiar then as Warren Buffett and Donald Trump are now. Like a Horatio Alger hero, Kaiser rose from lower-middle-class origins to become an enormously wealthy entrepreneur, building roads, bridges, dams, and housing. He established giant businesses in cement, aluminum, chemicals, steel, health care, and tourism. During World War II, his companies built cargo planes and Liberty ships. After the war, he manufactured the Kaiser-Frazer automobile. Along the way, he also became a major force in the development of the western United States, including Hawaii.

Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West is the first biography of this remarkable man. Drawing on a wealth of archival material never before utilized, Mark Foster paints an evenhanded portrait of a man of driving ambition and integrity, perhaps the ultimate "can-do" capitalist. He covers Kaiser's entire life (1882–1967), emphasizing many business ventures. He demonstrates that Kaiser was the prototypical "frontier" entrepreneur who often used government and union support to tame the "wilderness."

Though today the Kaiser industries are no longer under family management, the Kaiser legacy remains great. Kaiser played a major role in building the Hoover, Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and Shasta dams. The Kaiser-Permanente Medical Care Program still provides comprehensive health care for millions of subscribers. Kaiser-planned communities remain in Los Angeles; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and Boulder City, Nevada. Kaiser Engineers was actively engaged in hundreds of huge construction jobs across the nation and around the world.

U.S. and business historians, scholars of the modern West, and general readers will all find much to absorb them in this well-written biography.

The Martínez del Río family was a vigorous contestant in the highly politicized economy of early national Mexico. David Walker’s case study of its successes and failures provides a unique insider’s view of the trials and tribulations of doing business in a hostile environment. The family’s ordeal in Mexico—a series of personal dislocations and traumas—mirrored the painful contractions of an old society reluctantly giving birth to a new nation.

Using previously undiscovered primary source materials (including the private correspondence and business records of the family, public notary documents, transcripts of judicial proceedings, and the archives of Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Relations and the British Foreign Office), Walker employs family history to analyze problems relating more generally to the development of state and society in newly independent Mexico.

The processes of socioeconomic formation in Mexico differed from those of Western Europe and the United States; accordingly, entrepreneurial activity had markedly contrasting implications for economic development and class formation. In the downwardly spiraling economy of nineteenth-century Mexico, economic activity was a zero-sum game. No new wealth was being created; most sectors remained stagnant and unproductive. To make their fortunes, empresarios, the Mexican capitalists, could not rely on income generated from authentic economic growth. Instead, they exploited the arbitrary acts of the interventionist Mexican state, which proscribed the free movement of factors within the marketplace. Speculation in the public debt took the place of more substantive undertakings. Coercive state power was diverted to create artificial environments in which otherwise inefficient and unproductive enterprises could flourish. But however well the empresarios might imitate the outward forms of industrial capitalism, they could not unlock the productive capacity of the Mexican economy. Instead, they and their allies and rivals engaged in destructive struggles to manipulate the state for personal gain, to the detriment of class interests, economic growth, and political stability.

The inspiring life story of Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor: breaking political ground, navigating patriarchal tradition, and persevering through great personal loss

Marking a milestone for women in state government, Marlene M. Johnson became Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor under Rudy Perpich’s gubernatorial administration in January 1983. That same year, she met her husband, Peter, and their deeply loving relationship profoundly sustained her for twenty-seven years. Rise to the Challenge weaves these personal and professional stories together in a courageous portrait of dedication and leadership.

Growing up in rural Minnesota, Johnson began organizing and advocating for change early, beginning with a campaign to introduce foreign languages into her high school curriculum. Pursuing a deeply felt commitment to improving the lives of others, she continued to sharpen her leadership skills throughout her life, participating in activist work in college, cofounding organizations to support women entrepreneurs and politicians, and eventually running an international education nonprofit.

A stalwart supporter, her husband gave Marlene strength and encouragement to face the challenges of the political landscape and its gender biases. Then, in 2010, he suffered a traumatic brain injury that would change both of their lives. Learning how to be a medical advocate and, eventually, facing the sorrow of Peter’s death, Marlene relied on the hard-fought resilience and belief in herself that Peter had helped her to develop.

A story of learning and leadership in politics, business, and public service, Rise to the Challenge is a moving portrayal of spirit, perseverance, and grace in the face of daunting personal challenges, supported by unwavering faith in the public good.

2026 Al Lowman Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)
2026 Bonney MacDonald Outstanding Book Award Winner, Center for the Study of the American West at West Texas A&M University (CSAW)

How West Texas business and culture molded the rise of conservatism in the United States.

Much of what we understand as modern American political conservatism was born in West Texas, where today it predominates. How did the people of such a vast region—larger than New England and encompassing big cities like Lubbock and Amarillo, as well as tiny towns from Anson to Dalhart—develop such a uniform political culture? And why and how did it go national?

Jeff Roche finds answers in the history of what he calls cowboy conservatism. Political power players matter in this story, but so do football coaches, newspaper editors, and a breakfast cereal tycoon who founded a capitalist utopia. The Conservative Frontier follows these and other figures as they promoted an ideology grounded in the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian attitudes of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers, including a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town notions of community responsibility. This political sensibility was in turn popularized by its association with the mythology and iconography of the cowboy as imagined in twentieth-century mass media. By the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Roche shows, it was clear that the cowboy conservatism of West Texas had set the stage for the emergence of the New Right—the more professionalized and tech-savvy operation that dominated national conservative politics for the next quarter century.