Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind America's Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860-1900

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, New York City was an undistinguished town, competing with Philadelphia and Boston to be America's dominant port city. Just two generations later, it had built itself into the country's powerhouse center of trade and finance, rivaled only by London as financial capital of the world. In Capital City, Thomas Kessner tells the story of this remarkable transformation.
With the advantages of its famous harbor and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, ...