The consolidation and scaling up of Holley-style continuous-process manufacturing businesses in the 1870s and 1880s—besides iron and steel, in oil, chemicals, flour, meat—eliminated many traditional craft categories. Labor historians sometimes speak of the “de-skilling” of manufacturing, which is not entirely accurate. It took considerable judgment

Tarbell especially romanticized—men whose lives ran “swift and ruddy and joyous . . . until a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.” But the hard fact was that with two or three exceptions, the region’s refiners were among the least efficient of all. As production technology shifted to favor

In any case, it is especially misleading to suggest that common law provided clear guidelines for settling novel issues in the United States. When the Sherman antitrust legislation was passed in 1890, everyone agreed that it incorporated the common law, but it took twenty years of split U.S. Supreme Court decisions, usually registered in strikingly

Pratt hired Gould to survey a tanning site, but was sufficiently impressed that he made him a partner and manager of the projected new tannery. So the pint-sized Gould, barely out of his teens, led fifty workmen into the woods and built virtually a full-scale town, including living and food service quarters, a mule-powered bark crushing plant and

Especially in the 1880s and 1890s, the Chicago School of urban architecture—Louis Sullivan was its greatest exponent—pioneered clean, elevator high-rise, glass-enclosed steel-frame designs, with minimal ornamentation, well-lighted, open interior spaces, and separate shafts for utilities. As one leading Chicago architect put it: Bearing in mind that

The muckraker Ida Tarbell once dismissed Rockefeller as a man with the “soul of a bookkeeper,” an image that has stuck to him ever since. It was true that he loved the completeness and concreteness of good ledgers, and insisted that every entry, every tally, every invoice had to be right; but the “bookkeeper” label does not begin to capture the

mainstream department stores aimed at the “middle-class” homemaker. They amazed and flattered her with the elegance of the environs and with the deference of the salesclerks, but canny retailers understood that their homemaker wasn’t wealthy, and had instincts of thrift and austerity stamped in her genes. They could pull her in with spectacle,

As a young man, we see him joining new settings, a church, perhaps, or an association of oilmen, and somehow, without apparent effort or almost without saying anything, he always emerges as the leader. Rockefeller was well built, though not as tall as his father, and a good athlete who enjoyed vigorous work—he loved to pitch in with the men at the

The creation of the Dow Jones Industrial Index in 1895 and John Moody’s Industrial Manual in 1900 were signposts of their growing importance.