Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Andrew Carnegie
A ranking of the forty wealthiest Americans of all time (Surprise: Only three of them are alive today)
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER
1839-1937 Read more >>
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. Read more >>
Fifty 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. Read more >>
Seventy-five 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. Read more >>
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 Read more >>
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. Read more >>
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. Read more >>
When I was very young, I thought Andrew Carnegie lived in Moberly, Missouri (population 12,000, smack dab between St. Read more >>
In his own time there raged about Andrew Carnegie, as about any man who pushes his head above the crowd, many a controversy. Read more >>