Tangled webs : entrepreneurial dreams, imperial designs, and the evolution of nineteenth-century urban elites, St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1849-1883 /
dominant role in the evolution of American life during the nineteenth century--not only creating, growing, and reorganizing firms, but also weaving business, government, and society into an intricate web reflecting the growth-oriented impulses of the expanding American nation. Emerging as important...
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
1998.
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| Online Access: | http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=733052281&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=2945&RQT=309&VName=PQD |
| Summary: | dominant role in the evolution of American life during the nineteenth century--not only creating, growing, and reorganizing firms, but also weaving business, government, and society into an intricate web reflecting the growth-oriented impulses of the expanding American nation. Emerging as important players in the urban communities they helped to build, entrepreneurs carried the young United States from a collection of rural-agricultural states hugging the Atlantic seaboard into an urban-industrial empire transcontinental in scale and scope. Entrepreneurial assumptions about what constitutes acceptable risk behavior not only shaped the American connection to the unfolding market economy of the nineteenth century, but also determined the rules that continue to dominate both family life, as well as legal, educational. religious, and political discourse in the United States. Their pecuniary conquests also made entrepreneurs into the nation's most powerful, revered, and despised elites. This is a study of one particular landscape where these profit-maximizing, success-oriented representatives of the American ''dream'' operated as visions of American Manifest Destiny spread north and west. Before 1849, the few thousand Indians and Euro-Americans who lived along major river arteries in Minnesota inhabited an isolated world on the fringe of American society. During the next 35 years, as the processes of American geographical and economic expansion, industrial and agricultural innovation, and rapid immigration advanced into the Upper Northwest, Euro-Americans moved Indians off their land, and St. Paul-Minneapolis emerged as the metropolitan center of American transportation, commerce, industry, education, religion, and politics for the region. By 1883 railroads extended from St. Paul-Minneapolis to the Pacific Coast, and the territory's expanding population occupied a landscape integrated into the market economy and linked to the institutions of the larger American nation. Entrepreneurial immigrants seeking money-making opportunities, social mobility, and political advancement in the tram-Mississippi West stood at the center of that transformation. Those who ascended the ranks-and emerged as the region's elites-dominated the enterprises and communities that recapped the future of the wheat-growing northwest, from Minnesota and Manitoba to the Washington-British Columbia divide. |
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| Item Description: | Vita. "Major Subject: History". |
| Physical Description: | xiii, 336 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm. Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilm Inc. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 305-331). |