Wrecked: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy

Name: Wrecked: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy
Start: 2025-09-04T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-09-04T19:30:00-05:00
Location: The Opera House

Schedule

Thu Sep 04 2025 at 06:00 pm to 07:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

The Opera House | Stevens Point, WI

Appleton author Thomas Nelson is joining Bound to Happen Books at the Stevens Point Opera House's Annex space for a discussion on his new book "Wrecked."
Thomas Nelson is the Outagamie County Executive (Appleton-Fox Valley, Wisconsin) and former majority leader of the Wisconsin State Assembly. He has written for or has been covered by numerous national publications including, Washington Post, New York Times, The Nation, Politico, NBC News, Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, The Progressive and American Prospect. Thomas writes on various historical topics; his current project, a long arc narrative of the Green Bay Packers, is due out in 2026. He is a graduate of Carleton College and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Wrecked links the story of America’s most infamous shipwreck to the story of an even larger disaster—the wreck of the American industrial economy. When the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a Lake Superior storm on November 10, 1975, more was lost than the ship and the twenty-nine lives on board. The disaster was a human tragedy as well as an indictment of the American industrial policies that eventually cost the nation thousands of jobs and marooned hundreds of communities.
Written with a passionate yet factually grounded intensity, Wrecked shows that the reasons for the decline of industrial manufacturing in the upper Midwest are linked to why the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, and to the legal turmoil that followed for the victims’ families.
The book conveys the sense of loss that still is felt by those affected, along with the outrage over the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and the inadequate maintenance and legal maneuvering over liability for the sinking of the ship. What follows is a fascinating critique of what went wrong and why.