Maury Klein

Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America

The Power Makers

To Americans living in the early twentieth century, E. H. Harriman was as familiar a name as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Like his fellow businessmen, Harriman (1847-1909) had become the symbol for an entire industry: Morgan sto

The Life & Legend of E.H. Harriman

The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents--and to do so, it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts. The Axis powers might have fielded better-trained soldiers, better weapons, and better tanks and aircraft, but they could not match American productivity. The United States buried its enemies in aircraft, ships, tanks, and guns; in this sense, American industry and American workers, won World War II. The scale of the effort was titanic, and the result historic. Not only did it determine the outcome of the war, but it transformed the American economy and society. Maury Klein's A Call to Arms is the definitive narrative history of this epic struggle--told by one of America's greatest historians of business and economics--and renders the transformation of America with a depth and vividness never available before.

Mobilizing America for World War II

A Call to Arms

Praised by the Chicago Tribune as "thoroughly and compellingly detailed history," Volumes I and II of Maury Klein's monumental history of the Union Pacific Railroad covered the years from 1863-1969. Now the third and final volume brings the story of the Union Pacific--the oldest, largest, and most successful railroad of modern times--fully up to date. The book follows the trajectory of an icon of the industrial age trying to negotiate its way in a post-railway world, plagued by setbacks such as labor disputes, aging infrastructure, government de-regulation, ill-fated mergers, and more. By 1969 the same company that a century earlier had triumphantly driven the golden spike into Promontory Summit--to immortalize the nation's first transcontinental railway--seemed a dinosaur destined for financial ruin. But as Klein shows, the Union Pacific not only survived but is once more thriving, which proves that railways remain critical to commerce and industry in America, even as passenger train travel has all but disappeared. Drawing on interviews with Union Pacific personnel past and present, Klein takes readers inside the great railroad--into its boardrooms and along its tracks--to show how the company adapted to the rapidly changing world of modern transportation. The book also offers fascinating portraits of the men who have run the railroad. The challenges they faced, and the strategies they developed to meet them, give readers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one of America's great companies. A capstone on a remarkable achievement, Union Pacific: The Reconfiguration will appeal to historians, business scholars, and transportation buffs alike.

The Reconfiguration: America's Greatest Railroad from 1969 to the Present

Union Pacific

After the Civil War, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad took the lead among southern railroads in developing rail systems and organizing transcontinental travel. Through two world wars, federal government control, internal crises, external dissension, the Depression, and the great Ohio River flood of 1937, the L&N Railroad remained one of the country's most efficient lines. It is a southern institution and a railroad buff's dream. When eminent railroad historian Maury Klein's definitive History of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad was first published in 1972, it quickly became one of the most sought after books on railroad history. This new edition both restores a hard-to-find classic to print and provides a new introduction by Klein detailing the L&N's history in the thirty years since the book was first published.

History of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad

A compulsively readable history of the stock market crash of 1929 is written by one of America's foremost business historians.

The Crash of 1929

Rainbow's End

Examines events leading up to the Civil War, from Lincoln's 1860 election, through Southern threats to secede, to the fall of Fort Sumter

Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War

Days of Defiance

Rainbow's End tells the story of the stock market collapse in a colorful, swift-moving narrative that blends a vivid portrait of the 1920s with an intensely gripping account of Wall Street's greatest catastrophe. The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls. We meet Sunshine Charley Mitchell, head of the National City Bank, powerful financiers Jack Morgan and Jacob Schiff, Wall Street manipulators such as the legendary Jesse Livermore, and the lavish-living Billy Durant, founder of General Motors. As Klein follows the careers of these men, he shows us how the financial house of cards gradually grew taller, as the irrational exuberance of an earlier age gripped America and convinced us that the market would continue to rise forever. Then, in October 1929, came a "perfect storm"-like convergence of factors that shook Wall Street to its foundations. We relive Black Thursday, when police lined Wall Street, brokers grew hysterical, customers "bellowed like lunatics," and the ticker tape fell hours behind. This compelling history of the Crash--the first to follow the market closely for the two years leading up to the disaster--illuminates a major turning point in our history.

Moshe Prywes

Haim Chertok

Beginning with a vivid evocation of the milieu of prewar Warsaw, where his upper-class family was both privileged among Jews and despised by Poles, Moshe Prywes deftly interweaves vignettes of his autobiography with keen observations about a world tumbling into war and madness. Mobilized into the Polish Army as a medical officer in 1939, he escaped the Nazi invasion but was captured by the Soviet Army and shipped off to a Siberian labor camp. He spent six years there, at one time serving as physician to 28,000 prisoners. After liberation his path led to Ukraine, Sweden, Paris, and in 1951, to the new Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem. Later he would serve as founding dean at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where his "Beer Sheva Experiment" remains a model for medical education worldwide. This fascinating retrospective is a story of personal courage in the face of great adversity, a life that was, as Prywes writes, "sustained by faith and hope: faith in humanity and hope for a better world".

Prisoner of Hope

Clears up misconceptions about the legendary American businessman, explains why he became the most hated man in America, and assesses his influence on American business.

Maury Klein

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