Edward Renehan
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"John is so calm, so poised, so much at home with himself, so much a familiar spirit of the forests," wrote Walt Whitman of his friend, the naturalist and writer John Burroughs. "He is a child of the woods, fields, hills - native to them in a rare sense (in a sense almost a miracle)." Henry James called Burroughs "a more humorous, more available and more sociable Thoreau. James wrote that "the minuteness of Burroughs's observation, the keenness of...
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Jay Gould was the robber baron's robber baron: the greatest financial and business genius of his time and also the most widely hated. Gould was the undisputed master of the nation's railroads and telegraph systems at a time when these were the fastest-growing new technologies of the age. He created new ways of manipulating markets, assembling capital and swallowing his competitors. Many of these methods are now standard practice; others were among...
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Using previously unreleased archives, the author narrates the compelling life of Cornelius Vanderbilt: willful progenitor of modern American business. Vanderbilt made his initial fortune in the transportation industry by building ferry and cargo routes for sailing vessels. Then he moved into steamboats and railroads. With the New York Central Railroad, Vanderbilt established the nation's first major integrated rail system, linking New York with Boston,...