David Cannadine

Mellon: An American Life

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

A landmark work from one of the preeminent historians of our time: the first published biography of Andrew W. Mellon, the American colossus who bestrode the worlds of industry, government, and philanthropy, leaving his transformative stamp on each. Andrew Mellon, one of America's greatest financiers, built a legendary personal fortune from banking to oil to aluminum manufacture, tracking America's course to global economic supremacy. As treasury secretary under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and finally Hoover, Mellon made the federal government run like a business-prefiguring the public official as CEO. He would be hailed as the architect of the Roaring Twenties, but, staying too long, would be blamed for the Great Depression, eventually to find himself a broken idol. Collecting art was his only nonprofessional gratification and his great gift to the American people, The National Gallery of Art, remains his most tangible legacy.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Seitenzahl: 832
• Erscheinungstermin: Februar 2008
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 232mm x 155mm x 43mm
• Gewicht: 1052g
• ISBN-13: 9780307386793
• ISBN-10: 0307386791
• Artikelnr.: 22895296

Autorenporträt

David Cannadine was born in Birmingham in 1950 and educated at the Cambridge, Oxford, and Princeton. He is the editor and author of many acclaimed books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, which won the Lionel Trilling Prize and the Governors' Award; Aspects of Aristocracy; G. M. Trevelyan; The Pleasures of the Past; History in Our Time; and Class in Britain. He has taught at Cambridge and Columbia and is now the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface
Prologue: A Family in History
PART ONE
In the Shadow of His Father, 1855–1900
1. The Patriarch Presides: Father and Sons, 1855–73
2. The Family in Business: Boys and Banks, 1873–87
3. The “Mellon System” Inaugurated: “My Brother and I,” 1887–98
4. The Great Leap Forward: Mergers and Matrimony, 1898–1900
PART TWO
Wealth’s Triumphs, Fortune’s Travails, 1900–1921
5. The Transition Completed: Family Man and Venture Capitalist, 1901–1907
6. The First Scandal: Separation and Divorce, 1907–12
7. Life Goes On: Business (Almost) as Usual, 1907–14
8. New Careers for Old: Single Parent, Aging Plutocrat, Emerging
Politician, 1914–21
PART THREE
The Rise and Fall of a Public Man, 1921–33
9. Hard Times with Harding: Political Realities, Getting Started, Settling
In, 1921–23
10. Better Years with Coolidge: Mellonizing America, Aggrandizing Himself,
1923–26
11. Carrying On with Hoover: Great Ideas to Great Crash, 1927–29
12. Triumphs amid Troubles: Fortune’s Zenith, Russian Pictures, Pittsburgh
Woes, 1929–31
13. “The Man Who Stayed Too Long”: Depression, Departure, London and Back,
1931–33
PART FOUR
Old Man, New Deal, 1933–37
14. His World Turned Upside Down: An Unhappy Homecoming, 1933–34
15. The Second Scandal: The “Tax Trial” and the National Gallery of Art,
1933–36
16. Beginnings and Endings: The Gallery Established, a Life in Its
Fullness, 1936–37
Epilogue: A Fortune in History
Appendix: The Mellon Family
A Note on Sources
Abbreviations for Notes
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index