East of Cleveland, Moral Imagination in Industrial Culture, 1820-1940, portrays the sweep of modern industrial history. In this, Dick Austin's most important book since Environmental Theology, he returns to his academic specialty - American social history and its impact upon personal ethics.

The players in this colorful drama include a carpenter, a laborer at the blast furnace, a prisoner of war, a woman suffrage leader, and evangelist, an engineering genius, a poet, and a preacher. Told with their own words and richly illustrated with photos from the period, East of Cleveland reads like a novel. Yet it is our history. Click here for more.

Dreams and Depression, the short second volume in this series on moral imagination, takes the story through the Second World War. .

Building Utopia, Erecting Russia's First Modern City, 1930, probes the same theme up close - during an intense 18-month period. In 1930 engineers with The Austin Company accepted one of the greatest construction challenges in modern history: to build Europe's largest automobile manufacturing complex and the Soviet Union's first modern city - on the Russian frontier, with newly recruited peasant labor.

Young Allan Austin captured the drama in engaging letters from Russia and in a feature article for The New York Times Magazine. Dick has supplemented his father's writing with extensive research in Russia, uncovering secret documents that allow him to tell "both sides" of this dramatic story. Click here for more.

You may click on the titles in the right-hand column to order any of Dick Austin's books, or to learn more about them. Note that USPS Priority mailing is now included in the price of any single book order. Also note new discounts on multiple-book orders.