Fascinating series. There’s a period of American history that in my own era was taught pretty much on the level of Washington and the cherry tree, ie, a lot of legend, no substance. This is the rise of the American Aristocracy, so to speak, the building of the castles, how and why…<\/p>\n
It started with the Triangular Trade, in which some Scottish merchants (the Tobacco Lords) early on arranged a deal with the shipment of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean sugar plantations, Rum from the Caribbean sugar plantations to the Americas, Tobacco to England…<\/p>\n
[Alas, it was one of my own x-great-grandfathers, an Adm Hawkins, who proposed this routing to Queen Elizabeth. He didn’t originate it the traffic, but he proposed at least the route that would enable the rum-colonies-tobacco-England part of it, which is one reason we aren’t all speaking Spanish: it funded the English navy in advance of the Spanish Armada—he was of a ship-building family, and used the funds to revised British ships and make them more efficient.] <\/p>\n
Then the Tobacco Barons of the Post-civil-war South, Reynolds, Phillips, etc, who found a way to get rich from the farms down there, and who formed the political connection with the tobacco farmers-US Congress that would make the southern voting bloc and tobacco linked.<\/p>\n
Add in the beginnings of the railroad, oil, and electricity, we have the subjects of this documentary—Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie…and the upstart Ford. Fascinating how they interlocked, and what they were up to. The Edison-Tesla business is in there. We’re headed for the motorcar. But there’s also the Homestead Riot, which stained Carnegie’s career, and may have driven him to philanthropy in remorse; and the Jamestown Flood, the characters of Frick, Teddy Roosevelt and others who had a hand in it….plus some footnotes that explain why we now have laws against private militias and watering down stock. It’s on the H2 channel, and if you missed it the first time around, catch it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fascinating series. There’s a period of American history that in my own era was taught pretty much on the level of Washington and the cherry tree, ie, a lot of legend, no substance. This is the rise of the American Aristocracy, so to speak, the building of the castles, how and why… It started with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}