Bubble in the sun: the Florida boom of the 1920s and how it brought on the Great Depression

Abstract

Younts adapted the business over time, and much more. Mill worker graffiti found in the extant buildings (and recorded from demolished ones) is decoded, thus illustrating the depth of the research here. Totaling 223 pages, including notes, a helpful bibliography and index, Morris organizes the book into seven chapters: Education in Indiana, The Growth of Industry in the United States, The Production History of Yount Mill, The Yount Family, The Lives of the Workers, Landscape Reconstruction at Yount Mill, and Conclusions. He illustrates the work with over 70 figures, tables, and graphs. The great value of the book is the rich history it uncovers of the importance of one small-scale manufacturer and how it created a once thriving community. Along the way, Morris paints a compelling, comprehensive narrative of a now mostly vanished rural industrial enterprise, the type of which underpinned the growth of the nation in the 19th century. Morris uses the Yount story to comment on education and its changing focus from pioneer Indiana through the present. Caleb Mills is the Yount educational counterpart: President of Wabash College, four miles distant from the Yount Mill, Mills was a leader in educational reform during the state’s early years. His writings illustrate the struggles to create, fund, and implement a public education system worthy of the name in 19th-century Indiana. Connecting educational reform to the rise and decline of Yount Mill, while commendable, is perhaps the least satisfying aspect of the work. The title unfortunately does not address the author’s thesis that “. . . the extant industrial site serves as a metaphor through which to provide critical commentary for educational policy in the twenty-first century.” The book would also have benefitted from more thorough copyediting. Despite this, Morris takes us on a remarkably innovative journey through a small yet richly detailed slice of American history.