An Island's Trade Book

With "Nineteenth-Century Shipbuilding on Long Island" as its subtitle, this illustrated history of shipbuilding villages peripheral to the giant shipyards on the Brooklyn and Manhattan waterfronts is also a history of last-century entrepreneurs in an industry that peaked in mid-century and then declined to disappearance by the 1920s. The small shipyards in Port Jefferson, Setauket, Northport, Centerport and Greenport survived through the last half of the century, as the metropolitan giants did not, and Richard Welch, professor of History at Long Island University and Editor of the Long Island Forum, explains why in detail and in anecdote, making this a social as well as an economic history of an island's trade.