The Associates: How Four Capitalists Created California
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The Associates: How Four Capitalists Created California Customer Reviews
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A terrific book on the railroads and California history
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| This is a quick well-written and readable guide to the building of the railroads as it relates to California. It tells the story of the Big 4, aka The Associates - Hunitington, Stanford, Hopkins and Crocker - four merchants who came out of almost nowhere and ended up controlling the biggest railroad empire in America. In earlier books Rayner has written about con men and the shady sides of business and I was worried that he might approach the story from that angle. But he ends up liking them, warts and all, and his picture of the scheming Huntington is especially good. Another interesting thing that Rayner points out is how our thinking about the railroads these days is almost entirely the product of the changing ways in which they've been written about in different intellectual phases of history. He gives us a tour of the sources, from the muckraking days to more modern historians who take the "greed is good" argument. Rayner doesn't take sides especially. I also have to say that as a professor of U.S. history specializing in the period in question, I found nothing to object to within these pages; the previous reviewer's complaints have the sound of someone who was trawling for things to carp about; for example, his point regarding Throg's Neck: this is a body of water and an adjoining neighborhood in the Bronx, so there is no error here at all. If you are looking for a one-volume history of the railroads in the Golden State, this is a fresh and neat little book. |
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