Merchant Adventurer


Book Description

This previously unpublished work, by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer James (1891-1955), tells the story of Irish-born William R. Grace (1832-1904) who, arriving in America as a teenager in 1846, worked his way up from ordinary seaman to become master of a vast commercial empire, reformer of the Democratic party, and New York City's first Catholic mayor. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




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Hudson


Book Description

While Hudson was first settled around 1872, the community's namesake Isaac Washington Hudson Sr.'s family did not permanently move here until 1878. By 1884, the new town of Hudson had been platted, and the community's first post office and school were built. In its infancy, the community grew fast and residents relied upon the lands and Gulf waters for their livelihood. With the fast-growing community came the establishment of numerous sponging and fishing businesses in addition to farms. The banks of the big Hudson Spring were becoming the center of commerce, and there the resident businessmen constructed their docks, fish houses, mercantile stores, hotels, and more. Today, with a development on every corner and vacant lands becoming extinct, it is extremely hard to imagine those times. Little of this past remains, and in its place the bulldozers are paving Hudson with progress.




Marquis and Merchant


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Underwriters of the United States


Book Description

Unassuming but formidable, American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the new nation. The international information they gathered and the capital they generated enabled them to play central roles in state building and economic development. During the Revolution, they helped the U.S. negotiate foreign loans, sell state debts, and establish a single national bank. Afterward, they increased their influence by lending money to the federal government and to its citizens. Even as federal and state governments began to encroach on their domain, maritime insurers adapted, preserving their autonomy and authority through extensive involvement in the formation of commercial law. Leveraging their claims to unmatched expertise, they operated free from government interference while simultaneously embedding themselves into the nation's institutional fabric. By the early nineteenth century, insurers were no longer just risk assessors. They were nation builders and market makers. Deeply and imaginatively researched, Underwriters of the United States uses marine insurers to reveal a startlingly original story of risk, money, and power in the founding era.







The Marquis


Book Description

Winner of the 2015 American Library in Paris Book Award The Marquis de Lafayette at age nineteen volunteered to fight under George Washington and became the French hero of the American Revolution. In this major biography Laura Auricchio looks past the storybook hero and selfless champion of righteous causes who cast aside family and fortune to advance the transcendent aims of liberty and fully reveals a man driven by dreams of glory only to be felled by tragic, human weaknesses. Drawing on substantial new research conducted in libraries, archives, museums, and private homes in France and the United States, Auricchio, gives us history on a grand scale revealing the man and his complex life, while challenging and exploring the complicated myths that have surrounded his name for more than two centuries







The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny


Book Description

Between 1750 and his death in 1781, the Marquis de Marigny?brother of Madame de Pompadour, courtier to Louis XV, and one of eighteenth-century France's important patrons of art and architecture?amassed a collection that was broad in scope, progressive in taste, and exceptional in quality and provenance. This book offers a transcription of the exhaustive inventory of Marigny's estate together with an essay in which Alden R. Gordon not only sketches Marigny's life and times but also re-creates the interiors and grounds where the paintings, statues, books, household goods, and other property listed in the inventory were displayed and used. Also included are plans of Marigny's last four residences; lists of heirs, paintings, and auction sales; transcriptions of shipping manifests and sales catalogs; indexes; and a glossary.







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