Advocate for American Enterprise William Buck Dana and the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 1865-1910

Subjects:

• Economics » Economic History
• Business » Business History
• History » American History -- Nineteenth Century

Reviews:

• This well-documented, detailed, and perceptive biographical and historical analysis of the career and times of William Buck Dana (1829-1910) imparts a sense of the reasoning and circumstances of Dana as a person as well as a journalist. Dana founded and operated the US's first weekly business journal after purchasing the monthly Hunt's Merchants Magazine in 1861. As editor and publisher of the New York-based Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Dana not only provided news and information to his readers, but through his editorials helped define the formation of business policies and American capitalism beginning in the antebellum era. Editorials in the Chronicle contributed to the debate and response to various issues--financial panics, immigration and child labor laws, strikes and work stoppages, the free coinage of silver, trade and tariff policies--and thus helped define how American capitalism came into existence. Recommended for academic collections, lower-division undergraduate through faculty.
  —Choice June 2002
• Important to contemporaries, the commercial and Financial Chronicle remains an essential source for both political and business historians looking back to that period....Given the paper's significance, a book on William Buck Dana, the Chronicle's founder and publisher-editor, is long overdue. Douglas Steeples fills this gap.
  —The Journal of American history June 2003
• Students of Gilded Age finance and economic thought will find Advocate for Free Enterprise indispensable. And for those who venture to plumb the recesses of "the business mind," this book serves a superb model.
  —The Journal of Economic History 2003
• Thanks to the diligent efforts of Douglas Steeples...we have a spledid biography of the long-term owner and editor, William Buck Dana...Steeples is an accomplished biographer who offers a skillfull mixture of detail and analysis. He weaves together the highlights of Dana's personal life as well as his career moves in brilliant fashion...Both political and economic historians with an interest in public debates centered on business and financial issues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should find this biography a valuable addition to their libraries.
  —Economic History Review.NET August 2002

• Endorsement From H. Roger Grant
  Professor/Chair
  Department of History
  Clemson University: In what should stand for years as the definitive study of the force behind the highly influential business newspaper, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, this delightful written book clearly places William Buck Dana in the context of the great economic, political, and social forces of his times. Douglas Steeples is especially adept at conveying who Dana was, his thoughts and his contributions. The book is exceptionally well researched. Not only has Steeples utilized appropriate secondary resources, but he has painstakingly ferreted out materials that are related to Dana and his financial paper. Steeples's achievement is immense and impressive.
• Endorsement From Gloria Ricci Lothrop
  W.P. Whitsett Professor of History
  California State University, Northridge: Douglas Steeples has written a richly evocative biography of William Buck Dana, who from 1865 to 1910 edited the Commercial and Finacial Chronicle, the nation's most prominent business monthly...has drawn from the archives of the Chronicle... as well as an array of primary and secondary sources to provide an overview of the economic development of this critical period on American business history....Skillfully using a wide range of sources he has crafted a biography illuminated by the life of an influential business figure.

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• Meteorology Today
• Meteorology Technology
• Meteorology and Society
• Unsolved Problems, Unanswered Questions
• Biographies
• Career Information
• Statistics and Data
• Selected Reprints, Documents, and Reports
• Professional Societies and Research Organizations
• Print and Electronic Resources
• Glossary
• Index