monopolies

Bernard A. Weisberger | May/June 1996

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.

R.I.P., ICC

John Steele Gordon | May/June 1996

One hundred and eight years of managing a problem that might have been solved at the outset with a single law

In the Roman army, the soldiers’ regular rations were principally in the form of large loaves of bread, each one enough for two soldiers for a day. This presented a big problem.

The Steamboat Monopoly

John Steele Gordon | November 1993

Had the state-granted cartel held up, our history would have been unimaginably different.

In the early 1970s, when Wall Street was going through a particularly bad time, it actually cost more money to buy a taxi medallion—a license to own and operate a taxicab in New York City—than it did to purchase a seat—a license to trade—on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.