Great Estates
The Lifestyles and Homes of American Magnates
Description:... "Beginning with the colonial era, when trade was overtaking landholding as a way to get rich, this book follows the restless careers of the U.S.'s most brilliant and driven merchants, industrialists, and financiers as they mastered a new economic world of textiles, railroads, oil, and steel. With the twentieth century came fresh opportunities: automobiles, motion pictures, broadcasting, publishing and retailing on a massive scale, and the vast horizon of high technology. Meet John Hancock, colonial Boston's "limousine liberal", and learn how John Jacob Astor parlayed success in the fur trade into status as Manhattan's master landlord and richest man in America - only to be eclipsed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who leaped like a nimble Croesus from steamships to railroads."--Global Books in Print.
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