Around the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. economy exploded making America the top manufacturing nation in the world. A handful of industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan, led this amazing growth spurt, and benefited handsomely from their efforts. However, many Americans did not reap similar fruits from this Industrial Revolution. This lecture will examine how the decades immediately before and after 1900 produced both a triumph of capitalism and the birth of socialism in the United States.

(Limit 35)