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In the early decades of the twentieth century, almost everyone in modern theater, literature, or film knew of Otto Kahn (1867-1934), and those who read the financial press or followed the news from Wall Street could scarcely have missed his name. A partner at one of America's premier private banks, he played a leading role in reorganizing the U.S. railroad system and supporting the Allied war effort in World War I. The German-Jewish Kahn was also perhaps the most influential patron of the arts the nation has ever seen: he helped finance the Metropolitan Opera, brought the Ballets Russes to America, and bankrolled such promising young talent as poet Hart Crane, the Provincetown Players, and the editors of the Little Review. This book is the full-scale biography Kahn has long deserved. Theresa Collins chronicles Kahn's life and times and reveals his singular place at the intersection of capitalism and modernity. Drawing on research in private correspondence, congressional testimony, and other sources, she paints a fascinating portrait of the figure whose seemingly incongruous identities as benefactor and banker inspired the New York Times to dub him the "Man of Velvet and Steel."
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Gentlemen Bankers investigates the social and economic circles of one of America’s most renowned and influential financiers to uncover how the Morgan family’s power and prestige stemmed from its unique position within a network of local and international relationships. At the turn of the twentieth century, private banking was a personal enterprise in which business relationships were a statement of identity and reputation. In an era when ethnic and religious differences were pronounced and anti-Semitism was prevalent, Anglo-American and German-Jewish elite bankers lived in their respective cordoned communities, seldom interacting with one another outside the business realm. Ironically, t...
Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.
Louis Barfe's elegantly written, authoritative and highly entertaining history charts the meteoric rise and slow decline of the popular recording industry. Barfe shows how the 1920s and 1930s saw the departure of Edison from the phonograph business he created and the birth of EMI and CBS. In the years after the war, these companies, and the buccaneers, hucksters, impresarios and con-men who ran them, reaped stupendous commercial benefits with the arrival of Elvis Presley, who changed popular music (and sales of popular music) overnight. After Presley came the Beatles, when the recording industry became global and record sales reached all time highs. Where Have All The Good Times Gone? also charts the decline from that high-point a generation ago. The 1990s ushered in a period of profound crisis and uncertainty in the industry, encapsulated in one word: Napster. Barfe shows how the almost infinite amounts of free music available online have traumatic and disastrous consequences for an industry that has become cautious and undynamic.
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Between the French Revolution and World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Jewish fold - by becoming Christians or, in liberal states, by intermarrying. Telling the stories of both famous and obscure individuals, Leaving the Jewish Fold explores the nature of this drift and defection from Judaism in Europe and America from the eighteenth century to today. Arguing that religious conviction was rarely a motive for Jews who become Christians, Todd Endelman shows that those who severed their Jewish ties were driven above all by pragmatic concerns - especially the desire to escape the stigma of Jewishness and its social, occupational, and emotional burdens. Through a detailed and colo...
'A magnificent work of scholarship' - Edmund de Waal 'I learned something new on every beautifully illustrated page' - Neil MacGregor 'A fascinating book about a long-forgotten world' - Hadley Freeman Through a series of striking case studies this revelatory book explores the world of Jewish country houses, their architecture and collections - and the lives of the extraordinary men and women who created, transformed and shaped them. Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses - properties that were owned, built, or renewed by Jews - tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference...
Composed of sixteen essays and fifteen illustrations, Angels in the American Theater explores not only how donors became angels but also their backgrounds, motivations, policies, limitations, support, and successes and failures.