To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists: Eastern Money, Frontier Populism, and the Politics of Market-Making in the American West

Maggor, Noam

doi:10.1093/ahr/122.1.55

Cited by 9 publications

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“…The historian Noam Maggor's work on Boston capitalists' investments in the West argues for the importance of incorporating western history more fully into broader narratives of American history. 85 I would say much the same about our own field. The American Renaissance looks quite different when viewed from Mandan.…”

Section: Cass Gilbert In St Paulmentioning

confidence: 89%

The American Renaissance in the West: Capital, Class and Culture Along the Northern Pacific Railroad

Solomonson¹

2021

Archit. hist.

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Wealth from western investments lit up the Gilded Age. East and West, it financed the mansions, balls and philanthropy that were integral to upper-class culture. Historians of capitalism have argued that a national upper class coalesced during the late nineteenth century and that the development of a common culture was essential to its formation. Much of this work has focused on the Northeast. How did this play out in the Trans-Mississippi West? This article explores the roles that architects and the buildings they designed played in the intertwined processes of class formation, capitalist expansion and the advancement of white settler colonialism in the American West. It begins in the early 1880s, when Henry Villard (1835–1900), president of the Northern Pacific Railway, launched an ambitious plan to complete the transcontinental railroad and enlisted the architects McKim, Mead & White and their assistant, Cass Gilbert (1859–1934), to design buildings of all kinds along the line — an unprecedented move for a new western railroad. It then follows Gilbert back to St Paul to examine two major projects, one for local clients and one for Villard’s colleague, the eastern capitalist William Endicott, Jr (1826–1914). As agents for eastern capitalists and their counterparts in the West, the architects and the buildings they designed activated in the West an elite aesthetic and professional culture initially generated in the Northeast. Operating across local, regional and national scales, they contributed to the expansion of capitalist markets, the formation of a national upper class and, more broadly, the processes of settler colonialism in a rapidly changing region.

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Section: Cass Gilbert In St Paulmentioning

confidence: 89%

The American Renaissance in the West: Capital, Class and Culture Along the Northern Pacific Railroad

Solomonson¹

2021

Archit. hist.

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“…Parece plausible, en cambio, ver en estas cláusulas el ejemplo de un proceso continuo para reorganizar el terreno político dentro del cual estaba enclavado el diseño de la política económica. Esto era evidente en las cláusulas constitucionales del Estado que declaraban a los ferrocarriles como common carriers y los tenían, por lo tanto, sujetos a regulación gubernamental en lo concerniente a los constantes subsidios del gobierno (y, de hecho, crecientes) a los proyectos de infraestructura, a las decisiones de la corte que declaraban muchos tipos de corporaciones como "empresas de servicios públicos", así como a cientos, si no es que miles, de estatutos estatales que afectaban todos los aspectos de la vida económica (Novak, 2010: 377;Novak, 1996;Maggor, 2016). "El mercado" nunca perdió su naturaleza esencialmente política.…”

Section: Hacia Una Historia Política Del Capitalismo Estadunidenseunclassified

Estados Unidos como una nación en desarrollo: consideraciones sobre las peculiaridades de la historia estadunidense

Link

Maggor

2020

El Trimestre

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Recientemente, se ha sugerido que la partida económica de los Estados Unidos después de la Guerra Civil marcó una “segunda Gran Divergencia”. Comparado con la “primera” —el surgimiento de Gran Bretaña durante la Revolución industrial—, esta segunda Gran Divergencia es curiosamente poco entendida: debido a que los Estados Unidos siguen siendo la plantilla para las narrativas de modernización, su trayectoria es más fácilmente aceptada como preordenada que interrogada como un resultado histórico poco probable. Pero ¿por qué el desarrollo debería haber sido problemático en todas partes, excepto en los Estados Unidos? Este artículo argumenta que falta una explicación sólida para el ascenso de los Estados Unidos: no se puede encontrar en una literatura de historia económica centrada en las dotaciones de factores ni en la historiografía americanista internalista, que a menudo reproduce relatos de modernización sobredeterminados inspirados por Max Weber. La vía de investigación más prometedora, argumentamos, es preguntar cómo las instituciones políticas estadounidenses configuraron lo que debería llamarse adecuadamente un Estado de desarrollo estadunidense. Tal perspectiva abre una amplia agenda de investigación comparativa que provincializa a los Estados Unidos desde la perspectiva de las experiencias de desarrollo en otros lugares.

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“…The late-nineteenth-century U. S. national government did shape the rules of the game, as Bensel documented decades ago. Yet it operated in conjunction with a constellation of subnational institutions that included state legislatures, state courts, and city councils (John, 2010;Link, 2020;Link & Maggor, 2020;Maggor, 2017aMaggor, , 2017b. In many instances, these institutions operated at cross purposes, creating an uneven, highly variegated, and bewilderingly complex regulatory landscape that could be maddingly corrupt and strangely perverse.…”

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confidence: 99%

Political contestation and the Second Great Divergence

John

2022

History Compass

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This essay considers Piketty's characterization of U.S. economic development in Capital and Ideology in the decades between 1860 and 1900, a period that historians have begun to call the "Second Great Divergence." It contends that Piketty's characterization of this period rests on outdated assumptions about the relationship between economic development and political contestation, and that Piketty's neglect of historical writing on this topic raises questions about his policy proposals. To highlight the limitations of Piketty's approach, it includes case studies of the telegraph industry and the telephone industry. For all of its erudition, range, and literary panache, Piketty's Capital and Ideology is, at its most persuasive, an updated restatement for a twenty-first century audience of the Polanyian critique of nineteenth-century economic liberalism. This is a worthy project, yet it is less novel in its conception and more problematic in its execution than might at first appear.

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To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists: Eastern Money, Frontier Populism, and the Politics of Market-Making in the American West

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

The American Renaissance in the West: Capital, Class and Culture Along the Northern Pacific Railroad

The American Renaissance in the West: Capital, Class and Culture Along the Northern Pacific Railroad

Estados Unidos como una nación en desarrollo: consideraciones sobre las peculiaridades de la historia estadunidense

Political contestation and the Second Great Divergence

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