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John Steele Gordon

John Steele Gordon has been a frequent contributor to American Heritage and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author most recently of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004). Gordon's writing concentrates on business and financial history, and his 1999 book, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000, was adapted into a two-hour CNBC special. Gordon's writing has also been published in the Washington Post's Book World, Outlook, Forbes, and The New York Times.

Articles by this Author

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.
The Golden Touch, Winter 2010 | Vol. 59, No. 4
Banker J. P. Morgan rescued the dollar and bailed out the nation.
The country’s financial hub has a long history of lying, cheating, and stealing.
How a debt-ridden banana republic became the greatest economic engine the world has ever known
It was a disaster from the beginning.
My Backyard, April/May 2006 | Vol. 57, No. 2
How lucky to have Central Park as your back yard
The problem is as old as the industry itself.
We gave the baby boomers plenty of room to play in
The New York Stock Exchange plans to modernize by merging with a new competitor, just as it did in 1869.
A fortune in other people’s back yards
Looking at the big picture
Cyrus McCormick takes on a major problem with agriculture.
Alexander Hamilton conceived an America that encouraged huge successes like his own.
What digital-camera makers learned from George Eastman
Business Scandal, October 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 5
After Henry Ford changed America, his grandson accomplished something almost as amazing.
How it happened that one disaster got left in the shadow of another, lesser one
And how history shows it’s actually good for us
James Gordon Bennett was the forefather of the people who are now inventing internet news.
The birth of the global village
 Henry Ford's autocratic ways should serve as a warning to other moguls and their corporations.
THE CRACKPOT IDEA THAT LED TO SOCIAL SECURITY
WE ALL LIVE BY WHAT HAPPENED ON NOVEMBER 18, 1883.
A century and a half of the U.S. economy, from the railroad revolution to the information revolution
Colossus, June 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 4
A CENTURY AND A HALF E U.S. ECONOMY, FRO RAILROAD REVOLUTION
Death of a Marque, April 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 2
OLDSMOBILE, GONE AFTER 107 YEARS
WALT DISNEY GAVE US DONALD DUCK, BUT ANOTHER MAN GAVE HIM HIS CHARACTER—AND HIS FAMILY

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

Thirty years ago this week, rumors began circulating about the supposed extramarital affairs of Sen. Gary Hart, the leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic nomination for President. In response, Hart challenged the media. He told The New York Times in an interview published on May 3, 1987, that…
Pork is not a partisan issue and not a new one. The term “pork barrel” is over a century old in its political sense, an allusion to the regular handing out of joints of salted pork, stored in barrels, by plantation owners to slave families before the Civil War. Because it is believed with nearly…
I did not mean to imply that Alger Hiss passed atomic secrets to the Russians. I used the atomic secrets image only as an example of a serious disclosure of classified information, as opposed to the trivial “outing” of someone who has had a desk job at Langley for the last several years and is such…
The Nobel Prize for Literature has just been awarded to the British playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter. The good news, I suppose, is that at least I knew who he was when I learned about his prize. That is a good deal more than can be said for Elfriede Jelinek, John Maxwell Coetzee, and Imre…
Ellen Feldman writes that post-election fatigue is an unlikely reason for President Bush’s recent troubles, given “the amount of time he spent vacationing at his ranch before Katrina.” I’ve taken a few cheap shots myself over the years, so I don’t much mind this rather gentle one, especially as I’m…
The Bush Administration right now is going through a major bad patch. Hurricane Katrina, the rising cost of oil, the Miers nomination, and the undropped shoe of the Valerie Plame investigation are but some of its troubles. As a result, Bush’s approval ratings are at the lowest point of his…
Fred Schwarz notes below that New York State has little that unifies it into a politically cohesive whole and that that is reflected in the state’s flag. Let me leave New York’s tangled politics and its even more tangled political history to another time and write a little about state flags. They…
Joshua Zeitz blogged on Wednesday that some liberal pundits, such as the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, are happily opining that the present troubles of the Bush Administration are turning the President into a lame duck if not a dead duck. Perhaps so, perhaps not. A week can be an eternity in…
The 2005 Forbes 400 list is out, and once again, alas, I failed to make the cut. And the cut this year is an altogether impressive $900 million. Only twenty-three on the list are worth less than a billion. A mere ten years ago, $340 million got you a spot among the American financial seraphim. In…
Ellen Feldman, in her posting of September 19, wrote about the Bonus March in the early 1930s and Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to demonstrators in early 1933. Leaving aside her highly dubious suggestion that a President of the United States should walk through the streets of a blacked-out city where…