Quotes

One man more than any other fixed our visual image of what Victorian London was like: the French illustrator Gustave Doré (1833–1883), whose illustration

Between 1850 and 1900 every measure of wealth, productivity, and well-being skyrocketed in America. The country’s population in the period tripled, but its wealth

So New York’s options were to go alone or go without. Despite the costs, risks, and almost total absence of necessary skills, it decided

If there is a cardinal sin in our world, it is not self absorption, but mass absorption, the dissolution of the indivdidual into the

Concrete was one of the most exciting products of the nineteenth century. As a material, it had been around for a very long time—the

In 1901, J. P. Morgan absorbed and amalgamated a host of smaller companies into the mighty U.S. Steel Corporation, the largest business enterprise the

Nash is yet another of the people in this story who rather came from out of nowhere, and his climb to greatness could not

Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters

If average consumption is any guide, then people ate quite a lot of healthy food: almost 8 pounds of pears per person in 1851,

Before the eighteenth century, agriculture in Britain lurched from crisis to crisis. An academic named W. G. Hoskins calculated (in 1964) that between 1480