The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901

Prize-winning historian and biographer Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons is the story of the Gilded Age’s giant American capitalists who seized economic power after the Civil War and altered the shape of American life forever.

The definitive book on the rise and power of early American capitalists, The Robber Barons examines the careers of such masters of finance and industry as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, E. H. Harriman, and Henry Clay Frick. In a fascinating narrative, mixing social, economic, and political history, Josephson shows that under the command of these industry titans, the country progressed from a mainly agrarian-mercantile society to an economy propelled predominantly by mass production.

With great verve and a fine sense of its dramatic values, what [Josephson] has written is not a mere series of biographies but a genuine history, with the stories of the great American capitalists skillfully interwoven, and with an eye always on the broader social background.–New York Times Book Review