Justus S Stearns

Near the turn of the twentieth century, “Pine King” Justus S. Stearns was Michigan’s largest producer of manufactured lumber and the owner of a prosperous coal mining operation headquartered in Stearns, Kentucky, a town he founded. Over the course of his career, Stearns would own at least thirty manufacturing businesses—making everything from finished lumber to kitchen utensils, game boards, and motors—as well as hotels, a railroad, and a power company. He was also an active member of the Republican Party who served one term as Michigan’s secretary of state and a philanthropist who gave a great deal of his wealth to causes in both Michigan and Kentucky. In Justus S. Stearns: Michigan Pine King and Kentucky Coal Baron, 1845–1933, author Michael W. Nagle details Stearns's astounding range of accomplishments and explores the influence of both paternalism and Social Darwinism in his business practices. Nagle begins by addressing key events in the first few decades of Stearns’s life and his initial foray into the lumber industry. Subsequent chapters explore Stearns’s political career, his timber operations in Wisconsin, and his coal, lumber, and railroad operations in Kentucky and Tennessee. Nagle also details the ancillary businesses that Stearns founded or purchased in the early twentieth century, even as his Stearns Salt & Lumber Company served as the anchor of his Michigan holdings, while Stearns Coal & Lumber did the same for his operations in Kentucky. The final chapter offers an overview and analysis of Stearns’s lifetime of accomplishments, including his impact on the town of Ludington, Michigan, where he maintained a residence for over fifty years. Nagle makes extensive use of primary source material from several historical archives as well as contemporary newspaper accounts, court documents, company records, and other primary sources. American history scholars, as well as general readers interested in Michigan’s lumbering era and Kentucky’s mining history, will enjoy this biography of an exceptionally influential businessman.

Winner of the Kniffen Award and an Honorable Mention from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Awards in Sociology and Anthropology Appalachia may be the most mythologized and misunderstood place in America, its way of life and inhabitants both caricatured and celebrated in the mainstream media. Over generations, though, the families living in the mountainous region stretching from West Virginia to northeastern Alabama have forged one of the country's richest and most distinctive cultures, encompassing music, food, architecture, customs, and language. In Appalachian Folkways, geographer John Rehder offers an engaging and enlightening account of southern Appalachia and its cultural milieu that is at once sweeping and intimate. From architecture and traditional livelihoods to beliefs and art, Rehder, who has spent thirty years studying the region, offers a nuanced depiction of southern Appalachia's social and cultural identity. The book opens with an expert consideration of the southern Appalachian landscape, defined by mountains, rocky soil, thick forests, and plentiful streams. While these features have shaped the inhabitants of the region, Rehder notes, Appalachians have also shaped their environment, and he goes on to explore the human influence on the landscape. From physical geography, the book moves to settlement patterns, describing the Indian tribes that flourished before European settlement and the successive waves of migration that brought Melungeon, Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers to the region, along with the cultural contributions each made to what became a distinct Appalachian culture. Next focusing on the folk culture of Appalachia, Rehder details such cultural expressions as architecture and landscape design; traditional and more recent ways of making a living, both legal and illegal; foodstuffs and cooking techniques; folk remedies and belief systems; music, art, and the folk festivals that today attract visitors from around the world; and the region's dialect. With its broad scope and deep research, Appalachian Folkways accurately and evocatively chronicles a way of life that is fast disappearing.