Barbara Floyd is well known as an Ohio historian and university archivist, and her new book reflects that scholarship. The major corporate glass industry archives are under her guardianship at the University of Toledo, and she has been the designer of many public reviews and exhibits using those archives. The Glass City represents the first book to fully study the link between Toledo and the glass industry, and it offers a history of both. As might be expected from a university archivist, the book is based on original sources. This makes the book a resource for current and future authors and researchers. Of special note is that the work is based on primary sources and is well illustrated from these primary sources.

The book is a true industrial biography and an excellent history of the city of Toledo itself. The beginning chapters deal with the factors that would eventually bring industrial greatness to Toledo. In addition, the book breaks new ground and new details in previously published biographies of Michael Owens, Edward Ford, and Edward D. Libbey, early glass manufacturers in Toledo. Owens’s, Ford’s, and Libbey’s unique relationships with the community give a human touch to the normal business careers covered by others. Floyd goes further in identifying lesser and sometime forgotten contributors to the development of the glass industry in Toledo, making her book a valuable resource also for local historians and libraries.

Floyd takes the history beyond the biographies of Owens, Ford, and Libbey, which all end in the 1940s. In fact, more than half of her book deals with the post-founders’ era. Floyd uses a chronological approach to craft the overall story, yet she addresses technical, social, and business factors with attention to personal biographies, making it a very readable and easy flowing approach for many types of readers. She does an outstanding job in dealing with the cloud of deindustrialization and globalization that approached Toledo in the 1970s and overtook it in the 1990s. Her study of the many aspects of globalization, such as outsourcing and foreign takeovers of the glass companies, is excellent. The work further explores the challenges to industrial companies with the challenges of rapid technological changes, environmental factors, and the highly competitive global world. Floyd does an outstanding job of analyzing the impact of these factors, which can be used in future works on other industrial community symbiotic relationships, such as the steel industry and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the rubber industry and Akron, Ohio.

Many new details of the formation, struggles, and hostile takeovers of companies, such as Libbey-Owens-Ford, Owens-Illinois, and Owens-Corning Fiberglass are covered using a variety of archival materials, many being first-time primary sources. The analysis of this very difficult period tells an important and overlooked period of history in Ohio. One shortcoming is a more detailed analysis on how the rise of the solar energy industry was part of the destruction of the glass companies. Floyd deals with this briefly when she notes it is a story of revival on a future industry in Toledo.