Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Introduction: The Business of America
- Prologue: A Hothouse for Economic Growth
- 1 The Marvel of Men and Machines
- 2 The Lure of Lovely and Lucrative Land
- 3 The Defeat of Distance and Desolation
- 4 The Potential of Plentiful Power
- 5 The Fabrication of Familiar Forms
- 6 Bargaining with Behemoths
- 7 The Collision of City and Country
- 8 The Mastery of Mass Markets
- Epilogue: The Boundaries of Big Business
- Sources and Suggested Readings
- Index
Prologue: A Hothouse for Economic Growth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Introduction: The Business of America
- Prologue: A Hothouse for Economic Growth
- 1 The Marvel of Men and Machines
- 2 The Lure of Lovely and Lucrative Land
- 3 The Defeat of Distance and Desolation
- 4 The Potential of Plentiful Power
- 5 The Fabrication of Familiar Forms
- 6 Bargaining with Behemoths
- 7 The Collision of City and Country
- 8 The Mastery of Mass Markets
- Epilogue: The Boundaries of Big Business
- Sources and Suggested Readings
- Index
Summary
Americans are constantly driven to engage in commerce and industry. Their origin, their social condition, their political institutions, and even the region they inhabit urge them irresistibly in this direction. Their present condition, then, is that of an almost exclusively manufacturing and commercial association, placed in the midst of a new and boundless continent, which their principal object is to explore for purposes of profit. This is the characteristic that most distinguishes the American people from all others at the present time.
– Alexis de TocquevilleThis observation, made during the 1830s by one of the most astute foreign observers of American life, could not have been more accurate. Since the founding of the Republic in 1789 the business of Americans has always been business, though for most people in those early years that task amounted to little more than scratching a living from the soil. Yet even the earliest settlers, despite all the hardships they had to endure, grasped the potential and sheer bounty of the new world that had become their home. It was in every respect a land of abundance, and one major American historian, David M. Potter, argued persuasively that economic abundance has been the dominant characteristic of American life. Thomas Dale, the governor of Virginia, observed in 1611 what would become a common theme when he said of his colony, “Take foure of the best kindgomes in Christendome and put them all together, they may no way compare with this countrie either for commodities or goodness of soil.”
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- The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870–1920 , pp. 5 - 16Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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