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Doug Brunt has quietly dropped a big history bomb for readers who care about real achievement over trendy victim narratives: his new nonfiction book, The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel, is available for pre-order and is set to hit shelves on May 19, 2026. This is not another Ivy League lecture on guilt — it is a revival of a forgotten industrial titan who, after the tsar, may have been the wealthiest man in Russia and a dominant force in the global oil industry.
Emanuel Nobel’s story reads like a rebuke to the left’s caricature of capitalism; he and his family built a petroleum empire that rivaled and in some respects outpaced Standard Oil, and they did it by innovating, investing in communities, and building real livelihoods for workers. Brunt’s research shows how the Nobels imported the best practices from America, invented technologies like the oil tanker, and even created towns and schools around their operations — the kind of nation-building the left pretends it can achieve through bureaucracy alone.
Brunt is the right man to tell this story because he has proven he can take complicated, forgotten episodes of industrial history and make them gripping to mainstream Americans; his previous work on Rudolf Diesel became a bestseller and drew real interest from Hollywood. That entrepreneurial spirit in storytelling mirrors the entrepreneurial spirit of Emanuel Nobel himself, and Brunt’s family-backed research trip to Sweden shows he didn’t phone this one in — he went after primary sources and the kind of on-the-ground reporting that actually produces truth.
There is a warning in this history that conservatives must not ignore: when revolutions seize productive capital, the result is loss — of jobs, of innovation, and of the moral fabric that binds prosperous societies. Joseph Stalin and other revolutionaries didn’t merely redistribute wealth, they wiped out the institutions that created it, and Brunt’s book reminds us why we should defend private enterprise and property as the engines of human flourishing rather than apologies for their existence. This isn’t nostalgia; it is a practical lesson in national survival.
On Megyn Kelly’s show Brunt also teased that his appetite for untold capitalist histories is far from satisfied, hinting at more projects ahead that will continue to excavate the people and innovations the modern academy has neglected. For patriotic readers who want narratives that celebrate hard work, ingenuity, and the messy, glorious reality of market-driven progress, Brunt’s announcements are exactly the kind of publishing news that should be cheered, not scoffed at.
Americans who love their country and its founding principles should pick up Brunt’s book when it’s released and support authors who fight against the cultural erasure of achievement. Remembering figures like Emanuel Nobel strengthens our argument that liberty, enterprise, and national pride are not interchangeable with greed, and it equips everyday citizens to push back against the fashionable amnesia that dominates so much of the cultural class.
