The age of iron
America's Industrial Revolution, the Robber Barons, and the Making of Modern America, 1865-1920By Susan Elaine Cromwell
Length6h 15m
About this audiobook
The complete narrative history of America's Industrial Revolution — Carnegie, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, the robber barons, the factory workers, and the making of modern America, 1865-1920.
In 1865, the United States was a nation of farms. By 1910, it produced more steel than Britain and Germany combined. Andrew Carnegie opened the Edgar Thomson Steel Works near Pittsburgh in 1875, hired Captain Bill Jones to drive production until it was the most efficient mill in the world, then sold the entire operation to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million — and spent his remaining years building 2,509 libraries while the workers who made his fortune labored twelve-hour days in mills where accidents killed by the hundreds each year.
This is the story of that transformation — of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould, Ida Tarbell, Samuel Gompers, and Eugene Debs — across twenty-four chapters in six parts. Historian Susan Elaine Cromwell traces the full arc of American industrialization from the Bessemer revolution through the Progressive regulatory response, covering the robber barons, the immigrant factory city, child labor, workplace disasters, and the antitrust tradition that still shapes American law.
Inside this Industrial Revolution history:
Carnegie's vertical integration — Mesabi Range ore, Great Lakes steamships, and connecting railroads giving Carnegie control from ore in the ground to finished rail on the loading dock (Chapter 1)
Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust — secret railroad rebates, the Cleveland Massacre that bought out 22 of 26 independent refineries in six weeks, and the 1882 trust controlling 90% of American refining (Chapters 2, 6)
The railroad nation — 30,000 miles of track in 1860 growing to 163,000 by 1890, Chinese workers blasting through the Sierra Nevada with black powder, and the 1883 time zones that synchronized the nation's clocks (Chapter 3)
The factory worker's world — twelve-hour days at 130-degree furnaces, an assumption-of-risk doctrine that blocked injury suits, and fifty-two years between the 1886 eight-hour demand and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (Chapter 13)
Workplace disasters — Monongah Mine, December 1907: 362 dead, the worst industrial accident in American history; Triangle Shirtwaist, March 1911: 146 young immigrant women dead in ten minutes (Chapter 16)
The regulatory response — the Sherman Antitrust Act, Standard Oil's 1911 dissolution into 34 companies, and the Federal Reserve replacing J.P. Morgan's one-man financial rescues (Chapters 17-20)
The robber barons delivered steel rails and kerosene at falling prices — and did so through methods that suppressed competition, exploited workers, and concentrated economic power in ways that democratic politics found intolerable. Cromwell delivers both sides of that ledger and the unfinished argument the industrial revolution bequeathed to every generation since.
For readers of Ron Chernow's TITAN and T.J. Stiles's THE FIRST TYCOON.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length6 hrs 15 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
20Chapter 13: The Factory Worker — Hours, Wages, and Dangerous Conditions
2Author’s Note
21Chapter 14: Child Labor — The Mines, Mills, and the Children Who Worked Them
3Prologue: The Factory Nation
22Chapter 15: The Immigrant Worker — Ellis Island, the Ethnic Neighborhood, and Industrial Labor
4PART ONE: THE FOUNDATIONS (1865-1880)
23Chapter 16: Workplace Disasters — The Mines, the Mills, and the Price of Industry
5Chapter 1: Steel — Andrew Carnegie and the Bessemer Revolution
24PART FIVE: THE REGULATORY RESPONSE
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 2: Oil — John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust
25Chapter 17: The Grange and Populism — Farmers Against the Railroads
7Chapter 3: The Railroads — The Iron Network That Made a National Market
26Chapter 18: The Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act
8Chapter 4: The Corporation — The New Business Form and Its Power
27Chapter 19: The Progressive Trust-Busters — Roosevelt, Taft, and the Breakup of Standard Oil
9PART TWO: THE ROBBER BARONS
28Chapter 20: The Federal Reserve — Banking Reform and Financial Regulation
10Chapter 5: Carnegie — Steel, Libraries, and the Gospel of Wealth
29PART SIX: LEGACIES
11Chapter 6: Rockefeller — Standard Oil and the Art of Monopoly
30Chapter 21: The American Standard of Living — What Industrialization Produced
12Chapter 7: J.P. Morgan — Finance, Consolidation, and the Banker's Power
31Chapter 22: The Corporate Economy — Big Business and Its Permanent Place in American Life
13Chapter 8: Vanderbilt, Gould, and Fisk — The Railroad Barons and Their Wars
32Chapter 23: The Antitrust Tradition — From Sherman to the Twenty-First Century
14PART THREE: THE INDUSTRIAL CITY
33Chapter 24: The Industrial Legacy — Environmental Cost and Economic Transformation
15Chapter 9: Pittsburgh and Chicago — The Factory Cities
34Epilogue: What Industry Made
16Chapter 10: The Urban Poor — Tenements, Jacob Riis, and How the Other Half Lives
35Acknowledgments
17Chapter 11: The Department Store and Consumer Culture — Macy's, Sears, and the New Commerce
36Selected Bibliography
18Chapter 12: Technology and Invention — Edison, Bell, and the Second Industrial Revolution
37About the Author
19PART FOUR: THE HUMAN COST
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