Macmillan Publishers USA, also known as Macmillan Publishing, is a privately-held American publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Macmillan USA under the Brett family 1.2 Merger with Crowell Collier 1.3 Macmillan since 1998 1.4 Controversies 2 Authors 3 Publishers 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

[edit] History

[edit] Macmillan USA under the Brett family

George Edward Brett opened the first Macmillan office in the United States in 1869 and Macmillan sold its U.S. operations to the Brett family, George Platt Brett, Sr. and George Platt Brett, Jr. in 1896, resulting in the creation of an American company, Macmillan Publishing.^[1] Previously, Mr. Brett managed the U. S. subsidiary, which his grandfather George Edward Brett created in 1896. Even with the split of the American company from its parent company in England, George Brett, Jr. and Harold MacMillan remained close personal friends.^[2]

George P. Brett, Jr. made the following comments in a letter dated 23 January 1947 to Daniel Macmillan about his family's devotion to the American Publishing Industry:

For the record my grandfather was employed by Macmillan's of England as a salesman. He came to the United States with his family in the service of Macmillan's of England and built up a business of approximately $50,000 before he died. He was succeeded . . . by my father, who eventually incorporated The Macmillan Company of New York and built up business of about $9,000,000. I succeeded my father, and we currently doing a business of approximately $12,000,000. So then, the name of Brett and the name of Macmillan have been and are synonymous in the United States.

Under the leadership of the Brett family, MacMillan served as the publisher of American authors, Winston Churchill^[3] , Margaret Mitchell, who wrote "Gone with the Wind"^[4], and Jack London^[5], author of "White Fang" and "Call of the Wild".

The Bretts remained in control of the American offices of Macmillan from its creation in 1869 to the early 1960s, “a span matched by few other families in the history of United States business.”^[2]

[edit] Merger with Crowell Collier

Through its merger with Crowell Collier in 1961 and other acquisitions (notably The Scribner Book Companies in 1984), the U.S. publisher became a media giant in its own right, as Macmillan, Inc. It was acquired by the controversial British tycoon Robert Maxwell in 1989 and eventually sold to Simon & Schuster in 1994 in the wake of Maxwell's death (1991) and the subsequent bankruptcy proceedings.

[edit] Macmillan since 1998

Pearson acquired the Macmillan name in America since 1998, following its purchase of the Simon & Schuster educational and professional group (which included various Macmillan properties).^[6] Holtzbrinck purchased it from them in 2001.^[7]. However, McGraw-Hill continues to market its pre-kindergarten through elementary school titles under its Macmillan/McGraw-Hill brand. U.S. operations of Georg von Holtzbrinck are now known as Macmillan.

[edit] Controversies

In 2008, Macmillan became embroiled in a controversy over the work of Professor Noel Ignatiev. Ignatiev, who was previously involved in a controversy at Harvard that led Dunster House to refuse to renew his contract over conduct was "unbecoming of a Harvard tutor,"^[8] ignited a new controversy when he wrote a section for The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, published by Macmillan Reference USA in which he asserted that "given Jewish intermingling with others for two thousand years, it is likely that the Palestinians—themselves the result of the mixture of the various peoples of Canaan plus later waves of Greeks and Arabs—are more directly descended from the ancient inhabitants of the Holy Land than the Europeans displacing them." that "Israel is a racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race. In this respect it resembles the American South prior to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy, and, yes, Hitlerite Germany." and that "The 'Jewish' population of Israel includes people from fifty countries, of different physical types, speaking different languages and practicing different religions (or no religion at all), defined as a single people based on the fiction that they, and only they, are descended from the Biblical Abraham. "It is so patently false that only Zionists and Nazis even pretend to take it seriously."^[9][10]

The American Jewish Committee, citing a large number of "factual and historical inaccuracies" in Ignatiev's encyclopedia entry and asserting that Ignatiev's previous work shows an "inherent bias toward Jews and Israel," accused Ignatiev of misrepresenting Zionism as an “ideology of race” and of promoting the canard of Zionist-Nazi “collaboration,” and called on the publisher to withdraw the entry, which was the only entry on a nation or national movement included in the Encyclopedia.^[11][12][13]

[edit] Authors

[edit] Publishers

• George Edward Brett

• George Platt Brett, Sr.

• George Platt Brett, Jr.

[edit] See also

Richard M. Brett
Macmillan Publishers

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• James, Elizabeth (2002) Macmillan: a Publishing Tradition. Basingstoke: Palgrave

ISBN 0-333-73517-X

[edit] External links

• Macmillan USA website

v • d • e Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group Macmillan US Publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux · First Second · Henry Holt · Macmillan Audio · Palgrave Macmillan · Picador · Quick and Dirty Tips · St. Martin's Press · Tor/Forge Education Bedford-St. Martin's · W. H. Freeman · Worth Publishers · i>clicker · Hayden-McNeil Children's FSG Books for Young Readers · Feiwel and Friends · Holt Books for Young Readers · Kingfisher · Roaring Brook · Priddy · Square Fish Pan Macmillan Macmillan · Pan · Picador · Tor · Macmillan Children's Books · Campbell · Young Picador · Sidgwick & Jackson · Macmillan Audio Books Nature Publishing Group Nature Nature · Nature Biotechnology · Nature Cell Biology · Nature Chemical Biology · Nature Genetics · Nature Geoscience · Nature Immunology · Nature Materials · Nature Medicine · Nature Methods · Nature Nanotechnology · Nature Neuroscience · Nature Photonics · Nature Physics · Nature Chemistry · Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Nature Reviews Nature Reviews Cancer · Nature Reviews Drug Discovery · Nature Reviews Genetics · Nature Reviews Immunology · Nature Reviews Microbiology · Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology · Nature Reviews Neuroscience Nature Clinical Practice Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine · Nature Clinical Practice Endocrinology and Metabolism · Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology and Hepatology · Nature Clinical Practice Neurology · Nature Clinical Practice Nephrology · Nature Clinical Practice Oncology · Nature Clinical Practice Rheumatology · Nature Clinical Practice Urology Nature International Nature China · Nature India Other journals European Journal of Human Genetics · The EMBO Journal · Heredity · Molecular Systems Biology · Neuropsychopharmacology  · British Journal of Cancer · Oncogene 'Scientific American Scientific American · Scientific American Mind Holtzbrinck Publishers S. Fischer Verlag · Rowohlt · Kiepenheuer & Witsch (85%) · Droemer Knaur (50%) Newspapers Die Zeit · Handelsblatt · Der Tagesspiegel · Lausitzer Rundschau · Main-Post · Saarbrücker Zeitung · SÜDKURIER · Trierischer Volksfreund