Preview – Wert, “Civil War Barons”

I received a copy of Jeffry Wert’s new Civil War Barons: Tycoons, Entrepreneurs, Inventors and Visionaries Who Forged Victory and Shaped a Nation, but was a little surprised to find that Da Capo Press sent an advanced reading copy (ARC). As a general rule, I don’t preview ARCs here – they don’t lend themselves to previews because they often don’t include everything that may be in the final version (for instance, I really hope they remedy the missing Oxford comma in the subtitle). However, Jeff is an acquaintance and a great guy, so I’m making an exception in this case. I’ll give you the skinny, with the caveat that things could change.

From the publisher:

From prominent historian and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Jeffry D. Wert, a multi-biographical work of a remarkable yet largely unknown group of men whose contributions won the war and shaped America’s future.

You get:

• 209 pages of text
• Eleven chapters, preface, prologue, and epilogue.
• Chapter titles:
  • The Administrators
  • The Visionary
  • The Inventors
  • The Improvisers
  • The Patriots
  • The Investors
  • The Tinkerers
  • The Dreamers
  • The Opportunists
  • The Builders
• Some still familiar names in the Postscript
  • Philip D. Armour
  • Gail Borden
  • Andrew Carnegie
  • John Deere
  • Cyrus McCormick
  • Edward Squibb
  • The Studebaker Brothers
  • Cornelius Vanderbilt
  • Frederick Weyerhaeuser
• No Index (yet)
• 31 pages of end notes
• A bibliography, including a fair number of archival sources, newspapers, and online sources

Jeff Wert is a prolific author familiar to most readers of this blog. Check out his Amazon author page here.