For twenty years Prof. Quentin Skrabec has been researching the history of America’s industrialization and the key figures who moved the process forward. Working from a home base in the industrial heartland of northern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, he set out to create a literary pantheon of great Americans who contributed to this country’s industrial rise. Dr. Skrabec has published a series of biographies at Algora. He has been an Associate Professor of Business at the University of Findlay, OH, since 1998.

Skrabec has published over fifty articles on history, industrial history and business, and five books on business, industry and management.

In his management career, Dr. Skrabec has served as a manager and vice president at LSE/LTV Steel, Jessop Steel and National Steel.

An experienced writer and biographer, Skrabec is a native Pittsburgher with a strong background in the local stories and heroes.

McGuffey Readers were best sellers only surpassed in America by the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary. In 2008, the McGuffey Eclectic Reader was ranked with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Alexander Hamilton’s...

McGuffey Readers were best sellers only surpassed in America by the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary. In 2008, the McGuffey Eclectic Reader was ranked with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Alexander Hamilton’s The Federalist Papers as “books that changed the course of U.S. history.” Published originally in the early 1830s, by 1920 over one hundred fifty million had been sold. Even today, sales average about thirty thousand a year. No single series of books dominated America as the McGuffey Readers did from 1836 to 1920.

The texts were the source of knowledge and motivation for American industrialists such as Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, H. J. Heinz, George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, and John D. Rockefeller, as well as the founder of Kroger Company—A. H. Morrill. McGuffey instilled the basic principles of capitalism and democracy, while promoting the basic virtue of giving to and helping the poor.  The McGuffey Readers are as much the root of American philanthropy as they are the root of American capitalism. Many American presidents, such as Lincoln, Harrison, Grant, Hayes, Cleveland, Harding, Garfield, McKinley, Truman, and Roosevelt attributed their scholarship to the McGuffey Reader. The list of Supreme Court and Federal judges is just as long. McGuffey approached education as a moralistic adventure. He interwove morals, American history, religion, and virtues into basic lessons. McGuffey more than anyone helped defined the American psyche.