Word: ages
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...assembly line and mass production, making ours a consumer as well as an industrial society. As the century progressed, the service economy began to compete with industry as fortunes were made in soft drinks (Coca-Cola), processed foods (Heinz), insurance (Travelers, AIG) and retail (Sears, Wal-Mart). The information age began in the 1920s, when Walt Disney, Louis B. Mayer and the rest of Hollywood began to build businesses of scale. But it wasn't until the 1950s, with the emergence of television as a mass medium, and the two most recent decades, with the computer's coming of age...
Today they have the look of fossilized reactionaries, but these turn-of-the-century titans were men who lived in booming, anarchic times and thrived on them. The Gilded Age was a turbulent period of unfettered capitalism and unfathomable wealth for them and their peers--an environment free of income tax, meddling regulators and other curbs on the animal spirits of freewheeling entrepreneurs. Yet these febrile decades, forever decried as the era of the robber barons, forged the tremendous engine of economic growth that propelled the country from rural isolationism in the 19th century to world industrial leadership...
Three men--Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan--personified this sweeping turn-of-the-century transformation. Imbued with all the greed, guile and enterprise of the age, they exhibited a bullish faith in America's future despite the depressions, strikes and financial panics that punctuated these tumultuous years. In their different ways, each dealt a mortal blow to the small-scale economy of the early republic, fostering vast industries that forever altered the size and scope of the nation's business...
...Rockefeller and Carnegie built the industrial age, then Morgan (1837-1913) financed it. The most imposing personage ever to bestride Wall Street--his nickname was Jupiter--Morgan had a thunderclap voice, a ferocious glare and a grotesquely disfigured red nose that, he once ruefully joked, had become "part of the American business structure." Where Rockefeller and Carnegie endured hardscrabble boyhoods, Morgan came from a well-to-do Hartford, Conn., family, and his appetite for bosomy women, enormous yachts (his 300-ft. Corsair lent him a piratical image) and exquisite art was legendary...
...much the same fashion, he worked on making sure that an automotive infrastructure developed along with the cars. Just like horses, cars had to be fed--so Ford pushed for gas stations everywhere. And as his tin lizzies bounced over the rutted tracks of the horse age, he campaigned for better roads, which eventually led to an interstate-highway system that is still the envy of the world...