The Age of Big Business

How American industry passed from workshops to combinations in fifty years — oil, steel, the telephone, farm machinery, the automobile — and what the men who built them did to each other on the way. Hendrick wrote it for the Chronicles of America series in 1919, close enough to the events to have interviewed the survivors. He admires the engineering and is cold about the finance, which is why the chapter on Rockefeller still reads well. Fifty-nine plates, from Bellows and Eakins to a clipper ship off Tuskar Light, give the era's own image of the machinery and the money it moved.