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Biographies
There are 9 items in this category
Carnegie Author: Peter Krass Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; (August 30, 2002)
One of the major figures in American history, Andrew Carnegie was a ruthless businessman who made his fortune in the steel industry and ultimately gave most of it away. He used his wealth to ascend the world?s political stage, influencing the presidencies of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. In retirement, Carnegie became an avid promoter of world peace, only to be crushed emotionally by World War I.
In this compelling biography, Peter Krass reconstructs the complicated life of this titan who came to power in America?s Gilded Age. He transports the reader to Carnegie?s Pittsburgh, where hundreds of smoking furnaces belched smoke into the sky and the air was filled with acrid fumes . . . and mill workers worked seven-day weeks while Carnegie spent months traveling across Europe.
Carnegie explores the contradictions in the life of the man who rose from lowly bobbin boy to build the largest and most profitable steel company in the world. Krass examines how Carnegie became one of the greatest philanthropists ever known?and earned a notorious reputation that history has yet to fully reconcile with his remarkable accomplishments.
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Raised in the milieu of the great English pioneer railway engineers, John Whitton conquered the Great Dividing Range in the 1860s, building transmontane lines by hand, before the use of dynamite and in some of the most remote and inhospitable terrain. His origins were humble, and his story one of social and material advancement through htalent, will, and matstery of production techniques. His achievement was such that, alone among engineers in Australia, he acquired an international reputation for his genius and his extraordinary achievements. He was responsible for the building of 2,131 miles of railway, traversing terrain as challenging as any railway engineer ever encountered. His most arduous tasks were undertakin early in his career, when railway technology involved pioneering techniques. He built his railways on limited budgets and sometimes in the face of powerful opposition, which believed that the colony could not afford railways at all.
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Henry M. Flagler (1830-1913), the ambitious Gilded Age tycoon who designed and built much of Florida's fashionable east coast, rode to success on the rails.
As John D. Rockefeller's closest adviser in the 1870s, Flagler helped assemble the Standard Oil empire. In this thoroughly researched biography, Akin shows that Flagler understood early in his career that cheap freight rates determined industrial profits. Portraying Flagler as an aggressive entrepreneur, Akin documents his shrewd negotiations to obtain reduced rates, rebates, and drawbacks from the railroads, thus assuring Standard Oil's national domination over oil transportation costs.
Flagler drove himself as hard as he drove a bargain, obsessed with the desire to create a monument to himself that he called my domain. His legacy was no less than modern Florida. In 1885, at the age of fifty-five, he turned his attention away from Standard Oil and began construction of the Ponce de Le?½ß?uxury hotel in St. Augustine, the city where he had honeymooned with his second wife. Realizing he could never fill its rooms unless better transportation with the North was available, he embarked on the second railroad venture of his lifetime, creation of the Florida East Coast Railway.
Flagler's resort empire eventually included The Breakers in Palm Beach and the Royal Palm in Miami; his Atlantic coast railroad extended all the way to Key West, an engineering achievement that was called the eighth wonder of the world. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Flagler dominated not just the resort and railroad industries in Florida but steamship and agricultural operations, too. Florida politicians gave his projects preferential treatment, even changing the state's divorce law so he could marry for a third time.
Woven into this biography are details about Flagler's family, personality, three marriages, alienation from his only son, and devotion to the Presbyterian church--copy that fueled society gossip columns from New York to Palm Beach for decades.
Edward N. Akin, author of Mississippi: An Illustrated History and other works on southern history, taught at Mississippi College in Clinton. His biography of Henry Flagler won the 1985 Phi Alpha Theta manuscript prize.
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Invisible Giants Author: Herbert H., Jr. Harwood Publisher: Indiana University Press; ISBN: 0253341639; (December 2002)
The saga of the Van Sweringen brothers, who seemingly came out of nowhere to create modern Cleveland.
nvisible Giants is the Horatio Alger-esque tale of a pair of reclusive Cleveland brothers, Oris Paxton and Mantis James Van Sweringen, who rose from poverty to become two of the most powerful men in America. They controlled the country's largest railroad system?a network of track reaching from the Atlantic to Salt Lake City and from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico. On the eve of the Great Depression they were close to controlling the country's first coast-to-coast rail system?a goal that still eludes us. They created the model upper-class suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, with its unique rapid transit access. They built Cleveland's landmark Terminal Tower and its innovative 'city within a city' complex. Indisputably, they created modern Cleveland.
Yet beyond a small, closely knit circle, the bachelor Van Sweringen brothers were enigmas. Their actions were aggressive, creative, and bold, but their manner was modest, mild, and retiring. Dismissed by many as mere shoestring financial manipulators, they created enduring works, which remain strong today. The Van Sweringen story begins in early-20th-century Cleveland suburban real estate and reaches its zenith in the heady late 1920s, amid the turmoil of national transportation power politics and unprecedented empire-building. As the Great Depression destroyed many of their fellow financiers, the 'Vans' survived through imaginative stubbornness?until tragedy ended their careers almost simultaneously. Invisible Giants is the first comprehensive biography of these two remarkable if mysterious men.
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Jim Hill was the greatest of all rail builders, probably in world history, also perhaps the most significant individual of the American Northwest. This biography is a brief, interpretive study, not in any sense definitive.
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James J. Hill (1838-1916), the Empire Builder, created a vast railroad network across the northwestern United States. In this splendid biography, Martin, the first researcher to have access to Hill's voluminous correspondence, richly portrays a man of many parts: an entrepreneur, a family man, a collector of notable French paintings, a promoter of scientific agriculture, and a booster for the Northwest.
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