America's First Billionaires: The Forgotten Era That Led to the Gilded Age скачать в хорошем качестве

America's First Billionaires: The Forgotten Era That Led to the Gilded Age

America's First Billionaires: The Forgotten Era That Led to the Gilded Age The fire started just after noon on a Thursday in May. Within hours, one hundred and sixty-six years of history had turned to ash. Nottoway Plantation, the largest antebellum mansion in the American South, was gone. Fifty-three thousand square feet. Sixty-four rooms. A white ballroom where seven daughters once danced. All of it reduced to rubble on May fifteenth, twenty twenty-five. But Nottoway was never supposed to survive in the first place. The Civil War should have destroyed it. Time and neglect nearly finished the job. That it stood as long as it did was something of a miracle. That it burned in our own time feels like the closing of a chapter most Americans never knew existed. Before the Gilded Age, there was another era of American fortunes. Cotton planters in Mississippi who commanded more wealth than the bankers of Boston. Merchant princes in New York who built marble palaces while the city around them was still mud and cobblestone. Immigrants who arrived with empty pockets and died richer than kings. By eighteen forty-eight, one man controlled nearly one percent of the entire American economy. His name was John Jacob Astor. And he was only the beginning. This is the story of what American wealth looked like before the robber barons arrived. The mansions they built. The empires they commanded. And the world that came crashing down when the first shots of the Civil War echoed across the South. Let´s start where all great fortunes begin. With a young man who had nothing. Public Domain Photos from: Library of Congress Wikimedia Commons (Non-restricted) Copyright Disclaimers • We use images and content in accordance with the YouTube Fair Use copyright guidelines • Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act states: “Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” #documentary #astor #vanderbilt #billonaire