Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Andrew Carnegie
Our century ends as it began, with corporations rushing headlong into wedlock.
Once again, it’s merger-mania time in the United States as a new century draws nigh. Headlines proclaim the impending or actual union of Capital Cities/ABC and Disney; of Turner and Time Warner; of Chase and Chemical; of USAir and United—or perhaps American.
When the government manipulated and misused the robber barons
Economists from Adam Smith on have written about the evils and dislocations that monopolies bring to an economy. What has been much less written about over the years, however, are the evils of monopsony.
There is an old saying about the transitory nature of American fortunes: shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. As Donald Trump has discovered, they can vanish a lot faster than that. But Trump is not the record holder for financial plummeting (at least not yet).
50 years ago, the builders of the Pennsylvania Turnpike completed America’s first superhighway and helped determine the shape of travel to come.
Most American motorists take for granted the concrete and asphalt web of interstate highways that has penetrated so deeply into the nation’s economy and thinking.
75 years ago, Americans paid their first income tax. And liked it.
On the evening of March 1, 1914, Americans all around the nation inaugurated what has become a spring ritual for millions of us.
A knowledgeable and passionate guide takes us for a walk down Wall Street, and we find the buildings there eloquent of the whole history of American finance
One of the pleasant burdens of friendship, and of living in a renowned and intimidating great city like New York, is that friends planning to visit will ask me to show them the sights of some quarter of town, most usually in the borough of Manhattan, county o
For the children and grandchildren of a poor boy from Pennsylvania, childhood was magic
BORN IN 1839 TO AN EMIGRANT COBBLER and his wife, Henry Phipps, Jr., grew up near Pittsburgh. Determined to escape the “despised” cobbler’s bench, he succeeded, eventually becoming a partner of his boyhood neighbor, Andrew Carnegie.
"My office is a zoo,” a friend of mine complained a few weeks ago.
For years it was seen as the worst of times: bloated, crass, witlessly extravagant. But now scholars are beginning to find some of the era’s unexpected virtues.
“Almost every time a serious disarmament effort got under way, it barely managed to move forward an inch or two before a great world cataclysm intervened”
As spring moved northward over Europe in 1970, a familiar scene was enacted in Vienna, a city where diplomacy is as much a part of the civic tradition as steelmaking in Pittsburgh.
When I was very young, I thought Andrew Carnegie lived in Moberly, Missouri (population 12,000, smack dab between St.
In his own time there raged about Andrew Carnegie, as about any man who pushes his head above the crowd, many a controversy.
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