On this episode of Our American Stories, few figures embody the rise of America’s economy in the nineteenth century more than Cornelius Vanderbilt. He began with nothing, working the waters of New York Harbor, and built a fortune that placed him among the wealthiest people in history. Known to some as a railroad baron and to others as the very model of a captain of industry, Vanderbilt created vast networks of steamships and railroads that fueled the Gold Rush, connected a growing nation, and forever changed the shape of New York City. Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer T.J. Stiles, author of The First Tycoon, shares how one man’s relentless drive to win laid the foundations for the modern corporation and the American economy itself.
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