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Economics
Architectural relics from great old liners find a home in the dining rooms of four new ships.
Henry Ford's autocratic ways should serve as a warning to other moguls and their corporations.
Just as every cloud has a silver lining, so disasters always have a redeeming feature. Because of the Titanic, no major ship has struck an iceberg since.
Today's Olympic ski center was yesterday's rugged and ragged silver-mining capital.
Park City, Utah, where much of this winter’s Olympics will happen, is a two-boom town.
A Chicago advertising executive's crusade for greater production through beautiful posters
During the boom years between World War I and the Great Depression, the American economy surged ahead on its war-tuned pistons, and the order of the day was production.
A century and a half of the U.S. economy, from the railroad revolution to the information revolution
1. Colossus
A student of an underappreciated literary genre selects some books that may change the way you see what you do.
It has always struck me that the best business novels are interactive.
A sampling of the wisdom of Americans from Ben Franklin to Cameron Crowe
ANDREW JACKSON GOT IN BIG TROUBLE WHEN HE WAS IN BUSH, JR.'S FIX.
WILLIAM HEWLETT AND THE BIRTH OF SILICON VALLEY
It began, as legend has it—and, in this case, the legend is true—in a one-car garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California, in 1938.
COLLINSVILLE, CONNECTICUT RETAINS ALL THE EARMARKS OF ITS 19TH-CENTURY VIGOR AND MANY DESCENDANTS OF THE PEOPLE WHO FUELED IT.
All along its 360-mile route, towns to which the canal gave birth are looking to its powerful ghost for economic revival.
OLDSMOBILE, GONE AFTER 107 YEARS
In December, General Motors announced that it would phase out its Oldsmobile line by 2004. Thus, the oldest name in American automobiles will disappear, after 107 years. This is important, of course, only symbolically.
IN WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA, CARS CAN STILL FILL UP AT A FOUNT THAT NURTURED THE AUTOMOTIVE AGE IN ITS INFANCY.
Reighard’s Gas and Oil, which stands at 3205 Sixth Avenue in Altoona, Pennsylvania, looks pretty much like a thousand—or twenty thousand—other service stations across the country.
How a forgotten congressman’s crusade helped bring about the incredible growth of the internet and much else, besides
When the news hit early this year that America Online, founded only 15 years ago, would buy Time Warner, a media giant whose history reaches back into the early 1920s, The New York Times devoted almost two-thirds of its front page to the
It took until late last year to undo the damage that Congress wreaked on the banking system in the 1930s.
How does one distill the millions of stories that are the history of Wall Street into a single book?
A couple of years ago, an editor at Scribner asked me to write a book covering the entire history of Wall Street. I was reluctant. I’d already written a book on the Wall Street of the Civil War era, and I have never liked writing about anything for a second time.
Statistics help us comprehend the world sometimes.
In one of the most famous metaphors in western thought, Plato wrote about a man chained in a cave. Unable to see outside, all he could know of the world beyond his prison was what he was able to deduce from the shadows that were projected on the wall by whatever passed by.
The federal government handled it far better than it would later economic disasters.
The year 1929, like 1066, 1492, and 1776, is one of those dates that summon up an instant picture in our collective imagination. For not only did that year see a stock market crash, it was the crash.
His reputation obscures a complex man haunted by tragedy.
History is full of misnomers that, like it or not, we are stuck with. Columbus, understandably confused about where he was, thought the people he encountered in the Bahamas were “Indians.” Like it or not, they have been ever since.
The fate of the codfish suggests that collectivism on the ownership level is as destructive as anywhere else.
If the 20th century has taught us anything about economics, it is that free markets work better than any other kind.
The son of an Italian immigrant built the largest privately-held bank in the world by helping other immigrants.
Many distinguished economists of the mid-20th century predicted an American economy that would be dominated by a relative handful of giant companies, soon nicknamed on Wall Street the Nifty Fifty.
The unexpected consequences of J.P.Morgan's deal to create U.S. Steel, which controlled 60% of the US market, have vibrated through every decade.
In the past century, the two major opponents on the question of free trade have changed sides completely.
The thunder of distant drums is sounding again as protectionists and free traders respond to President Clinton’s efforts to get fast-track authority to negotiate multilateral trading agreements in advance of congressional approval.
In a century of technological revolutions, this was perhaps the quietest.
It is one of the most famous oneword lines in the history of Hollywood: “Plastics.” But however intergenerationally challenged that half-drunk friend of Dustin Huffman’s parents may have been in The Graduate, he was right about the impor
Bourbon whiskey has had a long, rugged ride from the frontier to the top shelf.
After 200 years, bourbon whiskey appears to be coming into its own.
In theory, it works fine. In practice, it has often made situations much worse.
Like Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, anti-trust keeps coming back. The latest company to find itself in the sights of the Anti-trust Division of the Justice Department is Microsoft.
The rush for treasure in the West is more than part of a picturesque past; it has profoundly shaped our present.
On January 24, 1848, one hundred and fifty years ago this month, a man named James Marshall was inspecting a millrace that he had just constructed on the American River, not far from Sacramento, California.