NEW IN PAPERBACK / NEBRASKA AMERICAN HISTORY / WESTERN HISTORY / CALIFORNIA / BIOGRAPHY
Empire Builder
John D. Spreckels and the Making of San Diego SANDRA E. BONURA F O R E WO R D B Y U W E S P I E C K E R M A N N Winner of the 2021 San Diego Book Award Empire Builder is the previously untold story of a pioneer who almost singlehandedly transformed the bankrupt village of San Diego into a thriving city. When he first dropped anchor in San Diego Bay in 1887, John Diedrich Spreckels set into motion a series of events that later defined the city. Within just a few years, this son of the German immigrant Claus Spreckels, known as the “Sugar King,” owned and controlled the majority of San Diego’s industry. After successfully building empires in sugar, shipping, and transportation and building development along the coast of California and across the Pacific, Spreckels rubbed shoulders with world leaders, successfully sued the U.S. government twice, and contributed to numerous educational, charitable, and cultural institutions in San Diego and San Francisco. Despite the fact that Spreckels created and owned much of San Diego’s early twentieth-century infrastructure, his name is unknown to many contemporary San Diegans. Nobody could have foreseen that Spreckels’s empire would be all but forgotten in so short a time. Sandra E. Bonura strives to correct this oversight by providing a behind-thescenes look at Spreckels and his family’s role in business. This deeply researched biography paints a realistic portrait of cultural, economic, and political aspects of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century California. “Fascinating. . . . Through one man’s life, we learn the more general history of how cities in this young country developed, a story of the ‘one-man town’ commonly played out across the
Sandra E. Bonura is a historian, researcher, and writer and has taught in higher education for more than twenty years. She is the award-winning author of Light in the Queen’s Garden: Ida May Pope, Pioneer for Hawai’i’s Daughters, 1862–1914 and An American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands: Letters of Carrie Prudence Winter, 1890–1893. DECEMBER 440 pp. • 6 x 9 • 35 photographs, 3 illustrations, 2 maps, index $27.95T • paperback • 978-1-4962-3341-7 $35.50 Canadian / £20.99 UK
American West. . . . The author has resurrected the Spreckels name from obscurity and established its place in San Diego history.”—Rowena Gray, California History “With exhaustive research and a storyteller’s flair, historian Sandra E. Bonura offers a sweeping narrative of one of the nation’s most important and unjustly forgotten industrialists. Bonura weaves a tale that is at once epic and intimate.”—Charles Slack, award-winning author, journalist, and business editor
university of nebraska press
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