"Some of the most accomplished scholars of railroad history…tell the story of these enterprises which totally re-shaped the western landscape."— The Michigan RailfanAfter Promontory profiles the history and heritage behind the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. Starting with the original Union Pacific—Central Pacific lines that met at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, the book expands the narrative by considerin...

An updated, in-depth history of the rise and fall of the L&N Railroad that serviced the southeastern United States.After the Civil War, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad took the lead among southern railroads in developing rail systems and organizing transcontinental travel. Through two world wars, federal government control, internal crises, external dissension, the Depression, and the great Ohio River flood of 1937, the L&N Railroad remained one of the country...

Maury Klein is one of America's most acclaimed historians of business and society. In The Power Makers, he offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yet - the "power revolution" that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century. The steam engine; the incandescent bulb; the electric motor-inventions such as these replaced backbreaking toil with machine labor and changed every aspect of daily life in the span of a few generations.The cast of chara...

The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents--and to do so, it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts.The Axis powers mig...

The first major history of the Crash in over a decade, Rainbow's End tells the story of the stock market collapse in a colorful, swift-moving narrative that blends a vivid portrait of the 1920s with an intensely gripping account of Wall Street's greatest catastrophe. The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls. We meet Sunshine Charley Mitchell, head of the National City ...

To Americans living in the early twentieth century, E. H. Harriman was as familiar a name as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Like his fellow businessmen, Harriman (1847–1909) had become the symbol for an entire industry: Morgan stood for banking, Rockefeller for oil, Carnegie for iron and steel, and Harriman for railroads. Here, Maury Klein offers the first in-depth biography in more than seventy-five years of this influential yet surprisingly understudied figure.

The 1911 New York Giants stole an astonishing 347 bases, a record that still stands more than a century later. That alone makes them special in baseball history, but as Maury Klein relates in Stealing Games they also embodied a rapidly changing America on the cusp of a faster, more frenetic pace of life dominated by machines, technology, and urban culture.Baseball, too, was evolving from the dead-ball to the live-ball era--the cork-centered ball was introduced in 1910 and ...

From one of America's foremost business historians, a penetrating and engaging look at the qualities that create great entrepreneursEntrepreneurs, even more than inventors, are essential to American business. While inventors produce ideas, entrepreneurs get things done, build the markets, make ideas reality. But what creative talents do the legendary American entrepreneurs share, and what can you learn from them about business success?Using lively character s...

Praised by the Chicago Tribune as "thoroughly and compellingly detailed history," Volumes I and II of Maury Klein's monumental history of the Union Pacific Railroad covered the years from 1863-1969. Now the third and final volume brings the story of the Union Pacific--the oldest, largest, and most successful railroad of modern times--fully up to date. The book follows the trajectory of an icon of the industrial age trying to negotiate its way in a post-railway world, plagued by se...

Rainbow's End tells the story of the stock market collapse in a colorful, swift-moving narrative that blends a vivid portrait of the 1920s with an intensely gripping account of Wall Street's greatest catastrophe. The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls. We meet Sunshine Charley Mitchell, head of the National City Bank, powerful financiers Jack Morgan and Jaco...

“Illuminating and well-written. . . . Deserves a place in the highest ranks of Civil War scholarship.” —The Cleveland Plain DealerIn November 1860, telegraph lines carried the news that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president. Over the next five months the United States drifted, stumbled, and finally plunged into the most destructive war this country has ever faced. With a masterful eye for the telling detail, Maury Klein provides fascinating new insights into the perio...

Praised by the Chicago Tribune as "thoroughly and compellingly detailed history," Volumes I and II of Maury Klein's monumental history of the Union Pacific Railroad covered the years from 1863-1969. Now the third and final volume brings the story of the Union Pacific--the oldest, largest, and most successful railroad of modern times--fully up to date. The book follows the trajectory of an icon of the industrial age trying to negotiate its way in a post-railway world, plagued by se...