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 Contributor
May/June 1996
One hundred and eight years of managing a problem that might have been solved at the outset with a single law
May/June 1996
HOW A NATION BORN OUT OF A TAX REVOLT has—and especially hasn’t—solved the problems of taxing its citizens
July/august 1996
Sylvester Graham’s preposterous theories about food and health inadvertently created the American diet-fad industry
September 1996
For a little while Stephen Girard held the future of the United States in his hands. Destiny had chosen the right man.
September 1996
A CENTURY AGO you’d eat steak and lobster when you couldn’t afford chicken. Today it can cost less than the potatoes you serve with. What happened in the years between was an extraordinary marriage of technology and the market.
October 1996
How Peter Cooper managed to make himself deeply rich and deeply beloved at the same time
November 1996
George Selden never built a car himself, but he did manage to secure a patent on every auto manufactured
November 1996
What you owe your car (ending the tyranny of the horse is only the beginning of it)
December 1996
At the age of eleven Roger Tory Peterson had an experience that produced a major hobby and a new industry
February/march 1997
A great and living monument to commerce, engineering, art, and human ingenuity

American Heritage is proud to host the
National Portal to
Historic Collections
Recently added:
- American Revolution Center
- National Museum of Civil War Medicine
- National Museum of the U.S. Navy
- Manassas National Battlefield
- Maryland State House
In association with the
American Association for State and Local History
Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
-
“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
-
65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
-
The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
-
Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
-
40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
-
A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
-
“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
-
The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
-
Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
-
The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.




