I haven't seen the history channel thing but I have researched carnegie and Ford, quite some interesting people. There is one not mentioned in the op and a fellow that seems to be quite unsung.
Hyam Soloman, a Spanish immigrant.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haym_Solomon
Hyam Soloman, a Spanish immigrant.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haym_Solomon
The men who built America are the people who were employed an oppressed by those robber-barons. It is a shame that people seem to forget that in America in those days equal rights were denied to women and minorities. How can you glorify the white men who profited from that era?
Very funny, and apt.
Very funny, and apt.
You don't have to agree with the glorification, but it is a good recap of their lives/history. I found the show to be entertaining and informative, not that I necessarily agree with some of the commentary. (and with people like Trump, Jim Cramer, and Jack Welch as commentators, I certainly wasn't a fan of that part anyway) Still, overall, I enjoyed it.
How can you say it is a perspective of the elite when you haven't even seen the show?
Everything isn't focused on the "people". What is the "people" anyway? Populations have conflicting histories when you scale down to the individual level, even amongst people of the same socioeconomic class.
No, it wouldn't. If there was no Rockefeller, it would have been Smith, or somebody else. The elite write the history, so it creates the illusion that history is somehow just a series of great men. But that's a theory that has been soundly debunked.
The people named in the title are just the corner stones of the discussion. The "elite" always are the focal point of history.
What is wrong with people being "elite" as you say?
Not great men, powerful men. It is with power that history is written and changed. How do you know it would be Smith or somebody else? Perhaps if Henry Ford didn't create a car company a worse person would have.
It wasn't the man himself but the effect that the power welded by such a man had on the course of history.
How would you discuss history without discussing powerful people. I get that they were just people just like anybody else. It was not who they were that was of historical importance but what they did.
It seems odd that you think that it is like worshiping of gods just to note that this or that impact on our nation was the result of somebody's action.
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