Spanning the Gilded Age

Spanning the Gilded Age PDF Author: John K. Brown
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421448629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
"The Eads Bridge and its protagonists provide new perspectives on the Gilded Age at large"--

Spanning the Gilded Age

Spanning the Gilded Age PDF Author: John K. Brown
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421448629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
"The Eads Bridge and its protagonists provide new perspectives on the Gilded Age at large"--

Spanning the Gilded Age

Spanning the Gilded Age PDF Author: John K. Brown
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421448637
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
The fascinating history of the St. Louis Bridge, the first steel structure in the world. In Spanning the Gilded Age, John K. Brown tells the daring, improbable story of the construction of the St. Louis Bridge, known popularly as the Eads Bridge. Completed in 1874, it was the first structure of any kind—anywhere in the world—built of steel. This history details the origins, design, construction, and enduring impact of a unique feat of engineering, and it illustrates how Americans built their urban infrastructure during the nineteenth century. With three graceful arches spanning the Mississippi River, the Eads Bridge's twin decks carried a broad boulevard above a dual-track railroad. To place its stone piers on bedrock, engineer James Eads pioneered daring innovations that allowed excavators to work one hundred feet beneath the river. With construction scarcely begun, Eads circulated a prospectus—offering a 500 percent return on investment—that attracted wealthy investors, including J. Pierpont Morgan in New York and his father, Junius, in London. This record-breaking design, which employed a novel method to lay its foundations and an untried metal for its arches, was projected by a steamboat man who had never before designed a bridge. By detailing influential figures such as James Eads, the Morgans, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Gould, Spanning the Gilded Age offers new perspectives on an era that saw profound changes in business, engineering, governance, and society. Beyond the bridge itself, Brown explores a broader story: how America became urban, industrial, and interconnected. This triumph of engineering reflects the Gilded Age's grand ambitions, and the bridge remains a vital transportation artery today.

Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality

Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality PDF Author: Edward O'Donnell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231539266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today. Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.

The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: BookRix
ISBN: 3736802285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
In United States history, the Gilded Age is a period approximately spanning the final three decades of the nineteenth century; from the 1870s to 1900. The term was coined by Mark TwainThe Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, satirizing what he believed to be an era of serious social problems disguised by a thin gold gilding. The theme of the novel is that the lust for getting rich through land speculation pervades society. The main action of the story takes place in Washington, D.C., and satirizes the greed and corruption of the governing class. Twain also satirizes the social pretensions of the newly rich. Although more than a century has passed since its publication, the novel's satirical observations of political and social life in Washington, D.C., are still seen as pertinent.

The Republic for which it Stands

The Republic for which it Stands PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199735816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 964

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Book Description
The newest volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, The Republic for Which It Stands argues that the Gilded Age, along with Reconstruction--its conflicts, rapid and disorienting change, hopes and fears--formed the template of American modernity.

The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age PDF Author: Howard Wayne Morgan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781258233990
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Contributing Authors Include John Tipple, Herbert G. Gutman, Ari Hoogenboom, And Many Others.

Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era PDF Author: John D. Buenker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317471687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1412

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Book Description
Spanning the era from the end of Reconstruction (1877) to 1920, the entries of this reference were chosen with attention to the people, events, inventions, political developments, organizations, and other forces that led to significant changes in the U.S. in that era. Seventeen initial stand-alone essays describe as many themes.

After the Ball

After the Ball PDF Author: Patricia Beard
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1664175423
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Set in 1905, against a backdrop of magnificence, excess and corrupting glamour, After the Ball's themes are stunningly fresh: greed and chicanery, flawed love between fathers and sons, and contradictory American attitudes about wealth. Glamorous, cultured and ambitious - but fatally young and naïve - James Hazen Hyde was twenty-three when he inherited the majority shares in the billion-dollar Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1899. Five years later, at the pinnacle of social and financial success, he made a fatal miscalculation, and set in motion the first great Wall Street scandal of the twentieth century. On the last night of January 1905, Hyde gave one of the most fabulous balls of the Gilded Age. Falsely accused of charging the party to his company, he was sucked into a maelstrom of allegations of corporate malfeasance that involved the era's most famous financiers and industrialists. “Wonderfully foreboding...exactly on pitch...a textured and compelling tragedy”—USA Today

The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781500731939
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
The Gilded Age in United States history is a period approximately spanning the final three decades of the nineteenth century; from the end of the Reconstruction Era in the 1870s to 1900. The term was coined by writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which they published in 1873, and which satirized what they believed to be an era of serious social problems disguised by a thin gold gilding.

The Curse of Bigness

The Curse of Bigness PDF Author: Tim Wu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999745465
Category : BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
From the man who coined the term "net neutrality" and who has made significant contributions to our understanding of antitrust policy and wireless communications, comes a call for tighter antitrust enforcement and an end to corporate bigness.