The Age of Big Business

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt addressed the American Historical Association to call for American history to be written as compelling stories of literary quality. Editor Allen Johnson of Yale University responded by publishing the Chronicles of America series: 50 succinct volumes on regional and thematic American history. These books, intended for secondary schools and college students, are expository works of American history composed by competent historians in the 1920's, well before the special pleading and upending of social norms typical of histories after 1970. This series is focused on the mainstream of American political life and leadership from its initial volumes on Native Americans and European colonists to its final volumes on Woodrow Wilson, Canada, and the Hispanic Republics to our South.

The American industrial tycoons of the Gilded Age embraced new technologies, scaled them, and made the telephone, the automobile, cheap steel, and petroleum fuels ubiquitous in American life. These dynamic leaders in business built corporate empires and the cities of the industrial heartland, making names for themselves and enduring fortunes that continue to influence American life. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and Vanderbilt all enliven this study of the titans of American enterprise. Burton Henrick's volume, #39 in The Chronicles of America series, includes the author's bibliography, an original historiographic essay on the "robber barons" interpretation of the tycoons, and a new bibliography of suggested readings in the field.

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