Starting in the late 1970s, tens of thousands of American industrial workers lost jobs in factories and mines. Deindustrialization had dramatic effects on those workers and their communities, but its longterm effects continue to ripple through working-class culture. Economic restructuring changed the experience of work, disrupted people's sense of self, reshaped local landscapes, and redefined community identities and expectations. Through it all, working-class writers have told stories that reflect the importance of memory and the struggle to imagine a different future. These stories make clear that the social costs of deindustrialization affect not only those who lost their jobs but also their children, their communities, and American culture. Through analysis of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, film, and drama, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization shows why people and communities cannot simply "get over" the losses of economic restructuring. The past provides inspiration and strength for working-class people, even as the contrast between past and present highlights what has been lost in the service economy. The memory of productive labor and stable, proud working-class communities shapes how people respond to contemporary economic, social, and political issues. These stories can help us understand the resentment, frustration, pride, and persistence of the American working class.

In 1893, Indianapolis carriage maker Charles Black created a rudimentary car - perhaps the first designed and built in America. Within 15 years, Indianapolis was a major automobile industry center rivaling Detroit, and known for quality manufacturing and innovation - the aluminum engine, disc brakes, aerodynamics, super chargers, and the rear view mirror were first developed there. When the Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened in 1909, the hometown manufacturers dominated the track - Marmon, Stutz and Duesenberg. The author covers their histories, along with less well known contributors to the industry, including National, American, Premier, Marion, Cole, Empire, Lafayette, Knight-Lyons and Hassler.

Lawyer and journalist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Louis Houck is often called the "Father of Southeast Missouri" because he brought the railroad to the region and opened this backwater area to industrialization and modernization. Although Houck's name is little known today outside Missouri, Joel Rhodes shows how his story has relevance for both the state and the nation. Rhodes presents a more complete picture of Houck than has ever been available: reviewing his life from his German immigrant roots, considering his career from both social and political perspectives, and grounding the story in both state and national history. He especially tells how, from 1880 to the 1920s, this self-taught railroader constructed a network of five hundred miles of track through the wilderness of wetlands known as "Swampeast Missouri"-and how these "Houck Roads" provided a boost for population, agriculture, lumbering, and commerce that transformed Cape Girardeau and the surrounding area. Rhodes discusses how Houck fits into the era of economic individualism-a time when men with little formal training shaped modern industry-and also gives voice to Houck's critics and shows that he was not always an easy man to work with. In telling the story of his railroading enterprise, Rhodes chronicles Houck's battle with the Jay Gould railroad empire and offers key insight into the development of America's railway system, from the cutthroat practices of ruthless entrepreneurs to the often-comic ineptness of start-up rail lines. More than simply a biography of a business entrepreneur, the book tells how Houck not only developed the region economically but also followed the lead of Andrew Carnegie by making art, culture, and formal education available to all social classes. Houck also served for thirty-six years as president of the Board of Regents of Southeast Missouri State Teacher's College, and as a self-taught historian he wrote the first comprehensive accounts of Missouri's territorial period. A Missouri Railroad Pioneer chronicles a multifaceted career that transformed a region. Solidly researched, this lively narrative also offers an entertaining read for anyone interested in Missouri history.

In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, America went from being a largely rural economy, with little internal transportation infrastructure, to a fledgling industrial powerhouse--setting the stage for the vast fortunes that would be made in the golden age of American capitalism. In The Dawn of Innovation, Charles R. Morris vividly brings to life a time when three stupendous American innovations--universal male suffrage, the shift of political power from elites to the middle classes, and a broad commitment to mechanized mass-production--gave rise to the world's first democratic, middle-class, mass-consumption society, a shining beacon to nations and peoples ever since. Behind that ideal were the machines, the men, and the trading and transportation networks that created a new, world-class economic power.

When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking The Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his own. With a specialized knowledge of finance and close connections to top Washington officials, Kiplinger was uniquely positioned to tell deeper truths about the intersections between government and business. With careful reporting and insider access, he delivered perceptive analysis and forecasts of business, economic, and politics news to busy business executives, and the newsletter's readership grew exponentially over the coming decades.More than just a pioneering business journalist, Kiplinger emerged as a quiet but powerful link between the worlds of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, and used his Letter to play a little-known but influential role in the New Deal. Part journalism history, part biography, and part democratic chronicle, The Insider offers a well-written and deeply researched portrayal of how Kiplinger not only developed a widely read newsletter that launched a business publishing empire but also how he forged a new role for the journalist as political actor.

When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking The Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his own. With a specialized knowledge of finance and close connections to top Washington officials, Kiplinger was uniquely positioned to tell deeper truths about the intersections between government and business. With careful reporting and insider access, he delivered perceptive analysis and forecasts of business, economic, and politics news to busy business executives, and the newsletter's readership grew exponentially over the coming decades.More than just a pioneering business journalist, Kiplinger emerged as a quiet but powerful link between the worlds of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, and used his Letter to play a little-known but influential role in the New Deal. Part journalism history, part biography, and part democratic chronicle, The Insider offers a well-written and deeply researched portrayal of how Kiplinger not only developed a widely read newsletter that launched a business publishing empire but also how he forged a new role for the journalist as political actor.

Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta examines the history of labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from the Civil War into the late twentieth century. This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation's deadliest labor conflicts-the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War. They detail how Delta landowners began seeking cheap labor as soon as the slave system ended-securing a workforce by inflicting racial terror, eroding the Reconstruction Amendments in the courts, and obstructing federal financial-relief efforts. The result was a system of peonage that continued to exploit Blacks and poor whites for their labor, sometimes fatally. In response, laborers devised their own methods for sustaining themselves and their communities: forming unions, calling strikes, relocating, and occasionally operating outside the law. By shedding light on the broader context of the Elaine Massacre, Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta reveals that the fight against white supremacy in the Delta was necessarily a fight for better working conditions, fair labor practices, and economic justice.

In the 1960s, Tillamook County was at war with itself. As the regional dairy industry shifted from small local factories to larger consolidated factories, as food safety and factory conditions became more important, as the profit margins between milk and cheese collapsed, Tillamook farmers found themselves at a crossroads. How should the producers work with distributors, and how could they advocate for their businesses without pricing themselves out of the market? On one side of the debate was Beale Dixon, head of the County Creamery Association, the co-op that represented the county's farmers and packaged their products for the big dairy distributors in the Willamette Valley. Dixon set up a scheme to offer low-interest, low-collateral loans to the supermarkets that stocked CCA products; he argued it was a cheap, easy way to ensure good will-and continued purchases-in a tight market. On the other side was George Milne, a respected farmer and board member of Tillamook Cheese and Dairy Association, the largest producer in the CCA. Milne believed that Dixon's loan program amounted to fraud and embezzlement, and cheated the farmers out of money they were due. The question of loans soon spiraled out into a community-wide dispute, exacerbated by a complex web of family and business relationships that made conflicts of interest hard to avoid. Dixon worked for both CCA and Cheese and Dairy; he was fired from one but not the other. The Cheese War raged for the better part of a decade, across board meetings and courtrooms and the community itself. Co-op members traded recall petitions and rival factions distributed misleading petitions and letters. While largely unknown outside of Tillamook County, the Cheese War was so divisive that some families remain fractured today. Sisters Marilyn Milne and Linda Kirk were children of the Cheese War. In elementary school, they saw how it absorbed their parents, Barbara and George Milne. As adults, they realized they actually knew very little about it and set out to learn the real story. The authors have conducted years of research through the archives and newspapers of Tillamook County and conducted numerous interviews and oral histories of key players in the Cheese War and their families. As Americans become ever more interested in food supply chains and ethical consumption, here is a story of the very human factors behind one of Oregon's most famous brands.

Early in the twentieth century, for-profit companies such as Duke Power and South Carolina Electric and Gas brought electricity to populous cities and towns across South Carolina, while rural areas remained in the dark. It was not until the advent of publicly owned electric cooperatives in the 1930s that the South Carolina countryside was gradually introduced to the conveniences of life with electricity. Today, electric cooperatives serve more than a quarter of South Carolina's citizens and more than seventy percent of the state's land area, bringing not only power but also high-speed broadband to rural communities.The rise of "public" power-electricity serviced by member-owned cooperatives and sanctioned by federal and state legislation-is a complicated saga encompassing politics, law, finance, and rural economic development. Empowering Communities examines how the cooperatives helped bring fundamental and transformational change to the lives of rural people in South Carolina, from light to broadband. James E. Clyburn, the majority whip of the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina, provides a foreword.

While the histories of gold, silver, and copper mining and smelting are well studied, lead has not received much scholarly attention despite a long history of both Native American and European desire for the ore. Over time, native peoples made lead ornaments in molds; French and American settlers used lead to form musket balls; red lead became an important production element for flint and crystal production; and white lead was used in making paint until the mid-twentieth century. Gray Gold aims to broaden understandings of early colonial and Native American history by turning attention to the ways that mining-and its scientific, technological, economic, cultural, and environmental features-shaped intercultural interactions and developments in the New World. Backed by remarkable original sources such as firsthand mining accounts, letters, and surveys, Mark Chambers's study demonstrates how early mining techniques affected the culture clash between Native Americans and Europeans all the while tracking the impact increased mining had on the environment of what would become the states of Illinois and Missouri. Chambers traces the evolution of lead mining and smelting technology through pre-contact America, to the amalgamation of aboriginal processes with French colonial development, through Spain's short occupation to the Louisiana Purchase and ultimately the technology transfer from Europe to an efficient and year-round standard of practice after American assumption. Additionally, while slavery in early American industry has been touched on in iron manufacturing and coal mining scholarship, the lead mining context sheds new light on the history of that grievous institution. Gray Gold adds significantly to the understanding of lead mining and the economic and industrial history of the United States. Chambers makes important contributions to the fields of United States history, Native American and frontier history, mining and environmental history, and the history of science and technology.

Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula juts into Lake Superior, pointing from the western Upper Peninsula toward Canada. Native peoples mined copper there for at least five thousand years, but the industrial heyday of the "Copper Country" began in the late nineteenth century, as immigrants from Cornwall, Italy, Finland, and elsewhere came to work in mines largely run from faraway cities such as New York and Boston. In those cities, suburbs had developed to allow wealthier classes to escape the dirt and grime of the industrial center. In the Copper Country, however, the suburbs sprang up nearly adjacent to mines, mills, and coal docks. Sarah Fayen Scarlett contrasts two types of neighborhoods that transformed Michigan's mining frontier between 1875 and 1920: paternalistic company towns built for the workers and elite suburbs created by the region's network of business leaders. Richly illustrated with drawings, maps, and photographs, Company Suburbs details the development of these understudied cultural landscapes that arose when elites began to build housing that was architecturally distinct from that of the multiethnic workers within the old company towns. They followed national trends and created social hierarchies in the process, but also, uniquely, incorporated pre-existing mining features and adapted company housing practices. This idiosyncratic form of suburbanization belies the assumption that suburbs and industry were independent developments. Built environments evince interrelationships among landscapes, people, and power. Scarlett's work offers new perspectives on emerging national attitudes linking domestic architecture with class and gender identity. Company Suburbs complements scholarship on both industrial communities and early suburban growth, increasing our understanding of the ways hierarchies associated with industrial capitalism have been built into the shared environments of urban areas as well as seemingly peripheral American towns.

In the past 100-plus years, forestland ownerships have gone through two structural changes in the US and other parts of the world: the accumulation of industrial timberlands between 1900s and 1980s and the transformation of industrial timberlands to institutional ownerships afterwards. This book is about the history and economics of these two structural changes with the emphasis on the latter. The scale of both changes is unprecedented and truly revolutionary, impacting tens of millions of acres of private landholdings and billions of dollars of investment and affecting industrial structure, forest management and policy, research and development, community welfare, and forest sustainability. Looking though a historical count of key events, players, prevailing management philosophies, public policy, and institutional factors, the author of this book searches for an economic explanation and assesses the impact of these two changes. Its main contributions are three folds. First, it explains why industrial firms were able to profit from owning large areas of forest lands in the first place and how institutional investors could purchase these lands later. Many details of the history that could have otherwise been lost are revealed in this book for the first time. Second, it compares private and public equity timberland investments with respect to risk-adjusted returns as well as such other dimensions of interest to investors and forest managers including alignment of interests, capacity to exploit market inefficiencies, and their forest management and conservation records. Finally, it provides thoughtful commentary into the future of institutional timberland investments and global forest sustainability. This book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the workings of the modern forest sector in the U.S. and elsewhere, forest investment, and forest sustainability.

From 1828 until the late 1860s, the Upper Missouri Outfit of the American Fur Company controlled the fur trade on the upper Missouri River from headquarters at Fort Union on the western edge of present-day North Dakota. In contrast, Fort William, an outpost of the rival Missouri Fur Company located a few miles east at the mouth of the Yellowstone River, struggled and sold out to its competitor less than a year after it opened in 1833. Published in full for the first time, the 1833-1835 Fort Union Letter Book features dispatches from several prominent fur-trade figures. This rare official record of outgoing correspondence reveals intriguing details about the day-to-day workings of an industry on the cusp of change. Robert Campbell's journal of his year at Fort William, on the other hand, is a personal account of his attempts to keep Fort Union founder Kenneth McKenzie from taking over the fledgling post he and William Sublette had started. Fort Union and Fort William offers a window into the fur and bison robe trade of the early 1830s, building upon the previous work of editors W. Raymond Wood and Michael M. Casler in Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre Chouteau: Journal and Letter Books, 1830-1850, published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press in 2017. The documents Wood and Casler have compiled and annotated include newly transcribed letters from Robert Campbell and William Sublette, providing two sides of the extraordinary story of the fur trade on the Northern Great Plains.

Since time immemorial Indian textiles, especially textiles from Bengal, were in great demand and exported to different parts of the world. Textiles from Bengal were appreciated by the Romans as early as first century ad. Numerous foreign travellers including Chinese, Portuguese, Arab and Persian, have mentioned the delicacy and beauty of Bengal textiles. From the mid-seventeenth century, there was a massive spurt in demand of cloth manufactured in Bengal, but after the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 this industry started to decline. This monograph traces the journey of Bengal textiles till its decline. Among the topics covered include accounts of the admiration for Bengal textiles from far and wide, the different types of textiles that were manufactured in Bengal, the major exporters, the major centres of production, the production system, the Dhaka muslin and the silk industry in Bengal, the procuring system that was adopted by the European / Asian merchants, the condition of the artisans who were the chief pillars of the textile industry and lastly the reasons behind the decline of the Bengal textile industry. This is the first comprehensive volume on Bengal textile industry. It is the outcome of the author's four and a half decades of work on various aspects of Indian Ocean trade, the activities of the European companies and their impact on Indian / Bengal's economy. Please note: This title is co-published with Manohar Publishers, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

The oil price collapse of 1985-6 had momentous global consequences: non-fossil energy sources quickly became uncompetitive, the previous talk of an OPEC 'imperium' was turned upside-down, the Soviet Union lost a large portion of its external revenues, and many Third World producers saw their foreign debts peak. Compared to the much-debated 1973 `oil shock', the `countershock' has not received the same degree of attention, even though its legacy has shaped the present-day energy scenario. This volume is the first to put the oil `counter-shock' of the mid-1980s into historical perspective. Featuring some of the most knowledgeable experts in the field, Counter-Shock offers a balanced approach between the global picture and local study cases. In particular, it highlights the crucial interaction between the oil counter-shock and the political `counterrevolution' against state intervention in economic management, put forward by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the same period.

In an era dominated by huge railroad corporations, Indianapolis Union and Belt Railroads reveals the important role two small railroad companies had on development and progress in the Hoosier State. After Indianapolis was founded in 1821, early settlers struggled to move people and goods to and from the city, with no water transport nearby and inadequate road systems around the state. But in 1847, the Madison & Indianapolis Railroad connected the new capital city to the Ohio River and kicked off a railroad and transportation boom. Over the next seven decades, the Indiana railroad map expanded in all directions, and Indianapolis became a rail transport hub, dubbing itself the "Railroad City." Though the Pennsylvania and the New York Central Railroads traditionally dominated the Midwest and Northeast and operated the majority of rail routes radiating from Indianapolis, these companies could not have succeeded without the two small railroads that connected them. In the downtown area, the Indianapolis Union Railway was less than 2 miles long, and out at the edge of town the Belt Railroad was only a little over 14 miles. Though small in size, the Union and the Belt had an outsized impact, both on the city's rail network and on the city itself. It played an important role both in maximizing the efficiency and value of the city's railroad freight and passenger services and in helping to shape the urban form of Indianapolis in ways that remain visible today.

L.T.C. Rolt's fame was born from his unique ability to produce works of literature from subject matter seemingly ill suited to such treatment - engineering, canals, railways, steam engines, agricultural machinery, vintage cars - such as in his classic biographies of Brunel, Telford, Trevithick and the Stephensons, and in his superbly written volumes of autobiography. In the first volume of Rolt's stunning autobiography, Landscape with Machines, the focus was on his younger days, from childhood to trainee engineer, and his ambition to explore the inland waterways of England in his converted narrow boat Cressy. Landscape with Canals, the second volume, described Rolt's meanderings through those water-lanes of England and Wales, combining his love for the English countryside with his life-long fascination with machines. In this book, written during the last years of his life, Rolt continues his intriguing and often diverse life story. He gives an account of the early days of the Talyllyn Railway Company and Preservation Society, describes his involvement in vintage and veteran car rallies, and vividly recreates his travels on the Tralee-Dingle Light Railway in remote West Kerry. Intermingled with these are his struggles to become a writer of repute. This final volume, published posthumously, completes a trilogy that is a fitting tribute to the man who, through his appreciation of the 'aesthetics of technology', could be said to have given a literary shape to the Industrial Revolution.

The Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law explores the challenge posed by the Holocaust to legal and political thought by examining the issues raised by the restitution class action suits brought against Swiss banks and German corporations before American federal courts in the 1990s. Although the suits were settled for unprecedented amounts of money, the defendants did not formally assume any legal responsibility. Thus, the lawsuits were bitterly criticized by lawyers for betraying justice and by historians for distorting history. Leora Bilsky argues class action litigation and settlement offer a mode of accountability well suited to addressing the bureaucratic nature of business involvement in atrocities. Prior to these lawsuits, legal treatment of the Holocaust was dominated by criminal law and its individualistic assumptions, consistently failing to relate to the structural aspects of Nazi crimes. Engaging critically with contemporary debates about corporate responsibility for human rights violations and assumptions about "law," she argues for the need to design processes that make multinational corporations accountable, and examines the implications for transitional justice, the relationship between law and history, and for community and representation in a post-national world. In an era when corporations are ever more powerful and international, Bilsky's arguments will attract attention beyond those interested in the Holocaust and its long shadow.

The history of aluminum takes in metallurgy, engineering, global business and politics and the advance of civilization itself. The earth's most abundant metal, aluminum remained largely inaccessible until after the Industrial Revolution. A precious commodity in 1850s, it later became a strategic resource: while steel won World War I, aluminum won World War II. A generation later, it would make space travel possible and the 1972 Pioneer spacecraft would carry a message from mankind to extraterrestrial life, engraved on an aluminum plate. Today aluminum-along with oil-is the natural resource driving geopolitics, and China has taken the lead in manufacture.

"When it comes to the issues confronting working people and their unions today, Phil Cohen knows what he's talking about as few people do . . . through knowledge born of bare-knuckle experience." --Si Kahn The Jackson Project is a dramatic, hard-hitting account of a brutal labor dispute at a West Tennessee textile mill. A historically accurate page turner, this is one of the few books about unions written by a frontline participant. In the spring of 1989, union organizer Phil Cohen journeyed to Jackson, Tennessee, to rebuild a troubled local and the problems were daunting: an anti-union company in financial disarray, sharply declining union membership, and myriad workplace grievances. In the tumultuous months ahead, as ownership of the plant twice changed hands, shutting down and then reopening to exclude union leaders and senior employees, he would risk his life and consider desperate measures to salvage the unions cause. In this riveting memoir, Cohen taken the reader from the union hall and factory gates to the bargaining table and courtroom, and ultimately to the picket line. We get to know the millworkers with whom he formed close bonds, including a stormy romance with a young woman at the plant. His up-close account brims with vivid descriptions of the negotiating process, the grinding work at the textile mill, the lives of its employees, and the grim realities of union busting in America. The last generation of the old south and it's textile subculture are portrayed as they come to terms with a changing economy, racial dynamics, and the introduction of hard drugs to their community. When the organizer's four year old daughter accompanies him to the field, a unique and unexpected dimension is added to the tale. The Jackson Project offers readers a rare insider's view of the American labor movement in action.

For nearly seventy years, John J. Young Jr. photographed railroads. With unparalleled scope and span, he documented the impact and beauty of railways in American life from1936 to 2004. As a child during the Great Depression, J. J. Young Jr. began to photograph railroads in Wheeling, West Virginia. This book collects over one hundred fifty of those images-some unpublished until now-documenting the railroads of Wheeling and the surrounding area from the 1930s until the 1960s. The photographs within this book highlight the major railroads of Wheeling: the Baltimore & Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the Wheeling & Lake Erie, the Pittsburgh & West Virginia, the New York Central, and the industrial and interurban rail lines that crisscrossed the region. These images capture the routine activities of trains that carried passengers and freight to and from the city and its industries, as well as more unusual traffic, such as a circus-advertising car, the General Motors Train of Tomorrow, and the 1947 American Freedom Train.

The first edition (1973) was acclaimed and it firmly established the Shropshire Coalfield as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. After several reprints a new edition appeared in 1981, but since then there has been much further research, and re-examination of interpretations, prompting a completely re-written book with an entirely new structure, and with many more illustrations, all integrated with the relevant text. This is the book that made Ironbridge a place of international pilgrimage, and, in its new edition, provides a 21st-century explanation why!

New Lanark, the former cotton spinning village, is internationally renowned for pioneering technology and social change in the Industrial Revolution. This book traces the community's history from its conception as a centre of mass production in 1785 to its present day standing as a World Heritage Site. Beginning with New Lanark's early development under its creator, the banker and textile entrepreneur David Dale (1739-1806), it looks at the social conditions of the mainly migrant workforce recruited to the village, and especially at the use of child labour from the cities. Detailing Robert Owen's social and educational experiments at New Lanark (1813-1825), it describes how the community became a showpiece around the world for its 'New System' of society. After Owen's departure for New Harmony in Indiana, the book charts the relative decline of the mills under a succession of owners - the Walkers, the Birkmyres, and the Gourock Ropework Company. The book concludes with the story of closure and long term restoration as a living village, major tourist attraction and inscription as a World Heritage Site. It is a fascinating read for anyone interested in heritage, conservation, social and community history.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Barrow-in-Furness became a pioneer in iron and steel production. It went on to grow astronomically - owning collieries in three counties and ore mines in two - and became the largest integrated steelworks in north Lancashire and Cumberland and, at one time, the largest steelworks in the world. Its success was due, in part, to having the prestige of three dukes as directors, as well as to being only 2 miles away from one of the largest and richest iron ore mines in the country. Written by two former employees of the works, Barrow Steelworks chronicles the company's past from the early empire through the inter-war and post-war years, the development of continuous casting in the 1950s, which revolutionised steelmaking, and, finally, the struggles and ultimate demise from the 1960s onwards of this once prominent industry.

This biography of Andrew Carnegie emphasizes the economic dimension of his career in industry. It examines his life as a dynamic innovator during the period when the steel industry rapidly expanded and the United States became a major industrial power. Carnegie rose from a poverty-stricken Scottish childhood to a position of international industrial leadership, philanthropy, and peace advocacy, by means of intelligence, entrepreneurship, ambition, tenacity, guile, and ruthless determination. It is shown that Carnegie excelled as an economic actor. His alertness to expected profit opportunities, and success in coping with the uncertainties of the marketplace, made him a major influence on the growth of many of the most important industries of late-nineteenth century United States and world economies. His contribution to the better coordination of the actions of both demanders and suppliers in those industries by managerial, technological, and institutional innovations is emphasized. It is also argued that those profit-seeking actions and innovations occurred in the context of political policies and social institutions that produced a tremendous mal-investment of resources. This mal-investment was a result of protective tariffs, the stimulus and waste of war, and government subsidization of the railroad industry. Carnegie's role in this massive diversion of resources from other uses to those from which he personally benefitted is also emphasized. Lastly, Carnegie's actions in giving away the great personal fortune that he accumulated as he built his business empire are examined and their economic implications assessed.