Iron empires : robber barons, railroads, and the making of modern America /
In 1869, when the final spike was driven into the Transcontinental Railroad, few were prepared for its seismic aftershocks. Once a hodgepodge of short, squabbling lines, America's railways exploded into a titanic industry helmed by a pageant of speculators, crooks and visionaries. Hiltzik shows...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Boston :
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
[2020]
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| Summary: | In 1869, when the final spike was driven into the Transcontinental Railroad, few were prepared for its seismic aftershocks. Once a hodgepodge of short, squabbling lines, America's railways exploded into a titanic industry helmed by a pageant of speculators, crooks and visionaries. Hiltzik shows how the vicious competition between empire builders such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan and E. H. Harriman sparked stock market frenzies, panics and crashes, provoked strikes that upended the relationship between management and labor, transformed the nation's geography and culminated in a ferocious two-man battle that shook the nation's financial markets to their foundations and produced dramatic, lasting changes in the interplay of business and government. |
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| Physical Description: | xxiii, 424 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780544770317 0544770315 |