Sublime

During his second year in the House, he wrote—himself, with no staff assistance—a bill embodying the old People’s Party dream of intensified government regulation of railroads, by giving the government authority over the issuance of new securities by the railroads. Happening, by chance, to see the bill, Louis D. Brandeis, then one of President

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started Pay-Pal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses

Unlike the original transcontinental, the Union Pacific–Central Pacific system to the south, whose charter preceded it by two years, the NP received no subsidy package of federal loans. But it got instead what amounted to the greatest subsidy Uncle Sam ever bestowed on a private entity: a land grant of twenty sections per mile of track in the

The mills drew from a swelling stream of farm girls and boys as New England agriculture withered under the onslaught of high-productivity New York farmers. Mill profits created an ample supply of venture capital, with activist investors prospecting for opportunities. The most talented young men perceived that a flair for machinery could be a fast

American capitalism and a bulwark of international commerce, Watson would become a hero in Nazi Germany—both to the common man and to Adolf Hitler himself.27

Bryan’s campaign was gallant but underfinanced, and the Republican Party, run by Mark Hanna, who shook down railroad corporations, insurance companies and big-city banks for campaign contributions on a scale never before seen, won what one historian calls “a triumph for big business, for a manufacturing and industrial rather than an agrarian order,