The Many Lives of Otto Kahn PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Many Lives of Otto Kahn PDF full book. Access full book title The Many Lives of Otto Kahn by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
Publisher: Pendragon Press
ISBN: 9780918728364
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Get Book Here
Book Description
Here was a man who was both equipped and disposed to be the most considerable Maecenas in the history of our theater, wrote Alexander Woollcott. It is the man behind that legend whom Mary Jane Matz brings. to life in this spirited biography. Otto Kahn, The King of New York in the twenties, had virtually created the city's new Metropolitan Opera with his enormous energy and financial backing. He was responsible for introducing Stanislavski, Nijinski, the Abbey Players, the Moscow Art Theater, and practically every other important personage and event in the most vigorous era of American theatrical history. He subsidized, sponsored, and had close relationships with Toscanini, Caruso, Chaliapin, Pavlova, Pirandello, Eugene O'Neill, Paul Robeson, Grace Moore, and hundreds of other artists whose names are now part of that history. This was the Otto Kahn whose fame lives on today-the man who was an activating force in American opera and theater for more than two decades. But there was another Otto Kahn, now less well known, who was more than a theatrical patron. The other Otto Kahn had amassed a banking fortune through his perspicuity and integrity in the era of unbridled Big Business, and had gone on to win the respect of the nation with his political, economic, and humanitarian activities in the First World War and its boom-and-bust aftermath. That Otto Kahn, a partner in the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb, was often accused of being a socialist.
Author: Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
Publisher: Pendragon Press
ISBN: 9780918728364
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Get Book Here
Book Description
Here was a man who was both equipped and disposed to be the most considerable Maecenas in the history of our theater, wrote Alexander Woollcott. It is the man behind that legend whom Mary Jane Matz brings. to life in this spirited biography. Otto Kahn, The King of New York in the twenties, had virtually created the city's new Metropolitan Opera with his enormous energy and financial backing. He was responsible for introducing Stanislavski, Nijinski, the Abbey Players, the Moscow Art Theater, and practically every other important personage and event in the most vigorous era of American theatrical history. He subsidized, sponsored, and had close relationships with Toscanini, Caruso, Chaliapin, Pavlova, Pirandello, Eugene O'Neill, Paul Robeson, Grace Moore, and hundreds of other artists whose names are now part of that history. This was the Otto Kahn whose fame lives on today-the man who was an activating force in American opera and theater for more than two decades. But there was another Otto Kahn, now less well known, who was more than a theatrical patron. The other Otto Kahn had amassed a banking fortune through his perspicuity and integrity in the era of unbridled Big Business, and had gone on to win the respect of the nation with his political, economic, and humanitarian activities in the First World War and its boom-and-bust aftermath. That Otto Kahn, a partner in the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb, was often accused of being a socialist.
Author: Theresa M. Collins
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469620219
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 398
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the early decades of the twentieth century, almost everyone in modern theater, literature, or film knew of Otto Kahn (1867-1934), and those who read the financial press or followed the news from Wall Street could scarcely have missed his name. A partner at one of America's premier private banks, he played a leading role in reorganizing the U.S. railroad system and supporting the Allied war effort in World War I. The German-Jewish Kahn was also perhaps the most influential patron of the arts the nation has ever seen: he helped finance the Metropolitan Opera, brought the Ballets Russes to America, and bankrolled such promising young talent as poet Hart Crane, the Provincetown Players, and the editors of the Little Review. This book is the full-scale biography Kahn has long deserved. Theresa Collins chronicles Kahn's life and times and reveals his singular place at the intersection of capitalism and modernity. Drawing on research in private correspondence, congressional testimony, and other sources, she paints a fascinating portrait of the figure whose seemingly incongruous identities as benefactor and banker inspired the New York Times to dub him the "Man of Velvet and Steel."
Author: Neal Gabler
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 030777371X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 537
Get Book Here
Book Description
A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry. The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.
Author: John Kobler
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Stephen Birmingham
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504038959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 672
Get Book Here
Book Description
Three New York Times bestsellers chronicle the rise of America’s most influential Jewish families as they transition from poor immigrants to household names. In his acclaimed trilogy, author Stephen Birmingham paints an engrossing portrait of Jewish American life from the colonial era through the twentieth century with fascinating narrative and meticulous research. The collection’s best-known book, “Our Crowd” follows nineteenth-century German immigrants with recognizable names like Loeb, Sachs, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. Turning small family businesses into institutions of finance, banking, and philanthropy, they elevated themselves from Lower East Side tenements to Park Avenue mansions. Barred from New York’s gentile elite because of their religion and humble backgrounds, they created their own exclusive group, as affluent and selective as the one that had refused them entry. The Grandees travels farther back in history to 1654, when twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived in New York. Members of this small and insulated group—considered the first Jewish community in America—soon established themselves as wealthy businessmen and financiers. With descendants including poet Emma Lazarus, Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, these families were—and still are—hugely influential in the nation’s culture, politics, and economics. In “The Rest of Us,” Birmingham documents the third major wave of Jewish immigration: Eastern Europeans who swept through Ellis Island between 1880 and 1924. These refugees from czarist Russia and Polish shtetls were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the “old country” to be accepted by the well-established German American Jews. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined. Their incredible rags to riches stories include those of the lives of Hollywood tycoon Samuel Goldwyn, Broadway composer Irving Berlin, makeup mogul Helena Rubenstein, and mobster Meyer Lansky. This unforgettable collection comprises a comprehensive account of the Jewish American upper class, their opulent world, and their lasting mark on American society.
Author: Robert A. Caro
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593802462
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1345
Get Book Here
Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man’s incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York. One of the Modern Library’s hundred greatest books of the twentieth century, Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens—the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses—and brings to light a bonanza of vital information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller. But The Power Broker is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man—an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives. We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd, an idealist. How, rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment, he fought for the power to accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering of parks and parkways, playlands and beaches—and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless miles of (never sufficient) highway, the hopeless sprawl of Long Island, the massive failures of public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. How, inevitably, the accumulation of power became an end in itself. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear—his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as "Triborough"—a government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses—an immense economic force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city's political and economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars' worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time—without ever having been elected to any office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system. Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars—he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder. This is how he built and dominated New York—before, finally, he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and his power (by Nelson Rockefeller). But his work, and his will, had been done.
Author: B. Alexandra Szerlip
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612195628
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Get Book Here
Book Description
Before there was Steve Jobs, there was Norman Bel Geddes. A ninth-grade dropout who found himself at the center of the worlds of industry, advertising, theater, and even gaming, Bel Geddes designed everything from the first all-weather stadium, to Manhattan's most exclusive nightclub, to Futurama, the prescient 1939 exhibit that envisioned how America would look in the not-too-distant 60s. In The Man Who Designed the Future, B. Alexandra Szerlip reveals precisely how central Bel Geddes was to the history of American innovation. He presided over a moment in which theater became immersive, function merged with form, and people became consumers. A polymath with humble Midwestern origins, Bel Geddes’ visionary career would launch him into social circles with the Algonquin roundtable members, stars of stage and screen, and titans of industry. Light on its feet but absolutely authoritative, this first major biography is a must for anyone who wants to know how America came to look the way it did.
Author: Howard M. Sachar
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679745300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1073
Get Book Here
Book Description
Spanning 350 years of Jewish experience in this country, A History of the Jews in America is an essential chronicle by the author of The Course of Modern Jewish History. With impressive scholarship and a riveting sense of detail, Howard M. Sachar tells the stories of Spanish marranos and Russian refugees, of aristocrats and threadbare social revolutionaries, of philanthropists and Hollywood moguls. At the same time, he elucidates the grand themes of the Jewish encounter with America, from the bigotry of a Christian majority to the tensions among Jews of different origins and beliefs, and from the struggle for acceptance to the ambivalence of assimilation.
Author: Thomas John Donahue
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433101663
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Get Book Here
Book Description
In a remarkable adventure, Jacques Copeau brought the troupe of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier to the Garrick Theatre in New York City in the fall of 1917. During the next two theater seasons, he staged more than forty different plays in repertory in French. He experimented with the use of both the tréteau nu, a bare raised platform, for some of Molière's farces and the loggia or unit set for all his plays. Copeau's experiments with scenography mark this period as a critical moment in the evolution of stage décor both in the United States and in Europe. Moreover, his development of a full repertory - sometimes three new plays in a week - demonstrated to the United States' fledgling art theater movement how important a full repertory is for the actor's continued training. Jacques Copeau's Friends and Disciples brings to light the support Copeau received from a diverse group of personalities without whom his undertaking would not have been possible: Otto H. Kahn, financier and supporter of the arts; Mrs. Phillip Lydig, a grande dame of New York high society; Antonin Raymond, the Czech architect who renovated the Garrick Theatre; Daisy Andrews, Copeau's tireless factotum; Louis Jouvet, stage manager, actor, and scenographer; Charles Dullin, actor, director and teacher; Suzanne Bing, a member of the troupe who embodied Copeau's ideals; and lastly Agnès Thomsen Copeau, Copeau's loyal wife and companion. This study places the achievement of Copeau in the context of the developments of both European and American theater at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Author: Daniel Schulman
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1101973013
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 625
Get Book Here
Book Description
The incredible saga of the German-Jewish immigrants—with now familiar names like Goldman and Sachs, Kuhn and Loeb, Warburg and Schiff, Lehman and Seligman—who profoundly influenced the rise of modern finance (and so much more), from the New York Times best-selling author of Sons of Wichita Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the “Forty-Eighters” fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass. These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers’ IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest investment banks in the world—Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers, J. & W. Seligman & Co. They would clash and collaborate with J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, and other famed tycoons of the era. And their firms would help to transform the United States from a debtor nation into a financial superpower, capitalizing American industry and underwriting some of the twentieth century’s quintessential companies, like General Motors, Macy’s, and Sears. Along the way, they would shape the destiny not just of American finance but of the millions of Eastern European Jews who spilled off steamships in New York Harbor in the early 1900s, including Daniel Schulman’s paternal grandparents. In The Money Kings, Schulman unspools a sweeping narrative that traces the interconnected origin stories of these financial dynasties. He chronicles their paths to Wall Street dominance, as they navigated the deeply antisemitic upper class of the Gilded Age, and the complexities of the Civil War, World War I, and the Zionist movement that tested both their burgeoning empires and their identities as Americans, Germans, and Jews.
