Douglas Steeples – författare

The Panic of 1893 and the depression it triggered mark one of the decisive crises in American history. Devastating broad sections of the country like a tidal wave, the depression forced the nation to change its way of life and altered the pattern and pace of national development ever after. The depression served as the setting for the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society, exposed grave economic and social problems, sharply tested the country's resourcefulness, reshaped popular thought, and changed the direction of foreign policy. It was a crucible in which the elements of the modern United States were clarified and refined. Yet no study to date has examined the depression in its entirety. This is the first book to treat these disparate matters in detail, and to trace and interpret the business contraction of the 1890s in the context of national economic, political, and social development.Steeples and Whitten first explain the origins of the depression, measure its course, and interpret the business recovery, giving full coverage to structural changes in the economy; namely, the growing importance of manufacturing, emergence of new industries, consolidation of business, and increasing importance of finance capitalism. The remainder of the book examines the depression's impact on society—discussing, for example, unemployment, birth rate, health, and education—and on American culture, politics and international relations. Placing the business collapse at the center of the scene, the book shows how the depression was a catalyst for ushering in a more modern America.

Originating as a silver-mining camp and marketed today as a silver-mining ghost town, Calico, CA outlived the silver era when borax was discovered in its hills. Supplying Borax worldwide—employing the twenty mule teams still associated with Twenty-Mule Team Borax—the Calico mines played a pivotal role in the evolution of the less glamorous industry, borax mining. Correcting the image sold to tourists, Steeples provides a tight geographic, economic, social, political, and business history of Calico, a once thriving community struggling to survive in primitive conditions. He tells the tale of three Calicos: the silver-mining town, the borax-mining center, and the ghost town, providing a masterful history of regional silver mining and national borax mining, processing, and marketing.The book provides an essential chapter in the development of western mining, the borax industry, and western mining camps. But it is more than the story of silver and borax in Calico. Steeples probes beyond the mines and mills in search of the community's soul, considering, for instance, the local paper, the Calico Print, the creation of the twenty-mule team image of Borax, the entrepreneurship of Francis Marion Borax Smith and his multinational organization, the education of the children, and the creation of the modern-day myth. Contrasting the working Calico with the illusory Calico, Steeples writes the complete history of the town from its natural setting to its imaginary legacy.