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Question: Good Book on American Corporate History?

I believe to truly understand the history of America one needs to understand the history of business in America. From the current oil crisis, mortgage crisis, housing bubble, dotcom bubble etc there has been the undeniable role of corporations in American life.

America's (and perhaps world) history is pitted with examples of corporate actions driving foreign and domestic policy (e.g. the savings and loan scandals, enron driving the california power crisis, united fruit company shaping central american politics, haliburton no bid contracts in iraq, nike sweatshops in foreign countries, IT and communication firms and development in India and China, musical copyright litigation of the internet, the massive buyouts of myspace and youtube by corporate entities).

To this effect I want to know if there are any books with a comprehensive examination of the role individual corporations and colluding entities in a historical format along with illustrated "family" trees.

Answer: One of the classic histories of the rise of 19th century big business is "The Robber Barons" by Matthew Josephson.

The article at this link has a good bibliography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_History_of_the_United_States

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