The Monied Metropolis

The Monied Metropolis is the first comprehensive history of the most powerful group in the nineteenth-century United States: New York City's economic elite. Using the insights of social history and a burgeoning historiography on the European bourgeoisie, the author examines the business activities of the city's merchants, industrialists, and bankers; describes their flamboyant social life; looks at their politics; and analyzes their view of the world. The Civil War, Reconstruction,...
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The Monied Metropolis is the first comprehensive history of the most powerful group in the nineteenth-century United States: New York City's economic elite. Using the insights of social history and a burgeoning historiography on the European bourgeoisie, the author examines the business activities of the city's merchants, industrialists, and bankers; describes their flamboyant social life; looks at their politics; and analyzes their view of the world. The Civil War, Reconstruction, labor, and democracy figure largely in the story. By the end of the Gilded Age, the book argues, upper-class New Yorkers had consolidated themselves into a self-conscious social class that put their stamp on the major issues of the day.