134 books match the query 'Business' and 6 start with g

cover of George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist

George W. Brackenridge

Maverick Philanthropist

By Marilyn McAdams Sibley

University of Texas Press, 1973

George W. Brackenridge (1832–1920) was a paradox to his fellow Texans. A Republican in a solidly Democratic state, a financier in a cattleman's country, a Prohibitionist in the goodtime town of San Antonio, he devoted his energies to making a fortune only to give it to philanthropic causes.

Indiana born, Brackenridge came to Texas in 1853, but left the state during the Civil War to serve as U.S. Treasury agent and engage in the wartime cotton trade. Later he settled in San Antonio, where he founded a bank and invested in railroads, utilities, and other enterprises.

Some of Brackenridge's contemporaries never forgave him for his Civil War career, but others knew him as a public-spirited citizen, educator, and advocate of civil rights. He cared little for what others thought of him. Yet, he confided once in a rare interview that his fondest ambition was to leave the world a better place for his having lived in it. To this end, he gave generously of himself and his means.

His best-known benefaction is Brackenridge Park, which he gave to the city of San Antonio, but most of his contributions were in the field of education. As regent of the University of Texas for more than twenty-five years, he gave the institution its first dormitory, a large tract of land in Austin, and innumerable smaller gifts. He also offered to underwrite the expenses of the University when Governor James E. Ferguson vetoed the appropriation bill for 1917–1919.

Other educational institutions to benefit from his largess were the public schools of San Antonio, a Negro college in Seguin, and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. In addition, he assisted individual students, especially women, through scholarships and loans.

Believing that the betterment of humanity lay in education, Brackenridge arranged for the continuation of his philanthropies. By his will he created the George W. Brackenridge Foundation, the first of its kind in Texas and one of the first in the United States.

Marilyn McAdams Sibley's study of George W. Brackenridge is the first biography of an important and, for his time, unusual Texan. It presents new material concerning the Mexican cotton trade during the Civil War, on the beginnings of banking in Texas, and on higher education in Texas.

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cover of Global Communication Electric: Business, News and Politics in the World of Telegraphy

Global Communication Electric

Business, News and Politics in the World of Telegraphy

Edited by M. Michaela Hampf and Simone Müller-Pohl

Campus Verlag, 2013

As catalysts of our present global condition, telegraphs are emblems of modernity. The establishment of a worldwide network of landline and submarine cable connections in the mid-nineteenth century fostered the emergence of new structures and patterns of interaction on a global scale. World politics and a global economy only became possible with the creation of “global communication electric.”

This book examines the emergence of this global media system between 1860 and 1930 in four sections—"Inter|Nationalisms," "Agents|Actors," "Use|News," and "Space|Time"—that aim to broaden and challenge popular conceptions of telegraphy. In exploring the varied uses of telegraphy, real or imagined, Global Communication Electric expands the notion of the telegraph as a globalizing medium: of connection as well as friction; of political, social, and economic entanglement as well as disentanglement; and of crossing as well as creating distance in space and time.
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cover of God's Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War

God's Businessmen

Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War

Sarah Ruth Hammond

University of Chicago Press, 2017

How evangelical businessmen in the 1930s and 1940s joined their religious and business lives.

The evangelical embrace of conservatism is a familiar feature of the contemporary political landscape. What’s less well-known, however, is that the connection predates the Reagan revolution, going all the way back to the Depression and World War II. Evangelical businessmen at the time were quite active in opposing the New Deal—on both theological and economic grounds—and in doing so claimed a place alongside other conservatives in the public sphere. Like previous generations of devout laymen, they self-consciously merged their religious and business lives, financing and organizing evangelical causes with the kind of visionary pragmatism that they practiced in the boardroom.

In God’s Businessmen, Sarah Ruth Hammond explores not only these men’s personal trajectories but also those of the service clubs and other institutions that, like them, believed that businessmen were God’s instrument for the Christianization of the world. Hammond presents a capacious portrait of the relationship between the evangelical business community and the New Deal—and in doing so makes important contributions to American religious history, business history, and the history of the American state.
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cover of Grace: A Play

Grace

A Play

Craig Wright

Northwestern University Press, 2012

The difference between belief and knowledge and the con­sequences of mistaking one for the other are at the heart of Craig Wright’s play Grace. An evangelical Christian couple, Sara and Steve, leave a dreary life in Minnesota for sunny Florida and the hope of fast money from turn­ing abandoned hotels into a chain of gospel-themed inns. Their new neighbor, Sam, is struggling to emerge from the trauma of a car accident that killed his fiancée and left him badly maimed. And the building’s pest exterminator, Karl, is still tormented by a dark childhood episode. As their stories converge, Wright’s characters find themselves face-to-face with the most eternally vexing questions—the nature of faith, the meaning of suffering, and the possibil­ity of redemption. Acidly funny and relentlessly search­ing, Grace is a trenchant work from an immensely gifted playwright.

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cover of Great Persuader: The Biography of Collis P. Huntington

Great Persuader

The Biography of Collis P. Huntington

David Lavender

University Press of Colorado, 1999

The Great Persuader is the biography of a robber baron, the greatest railroad mogul of them all-Collis P. Huntington, the Sacramento, California, storekeeper who, along with Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins, parlayed $1,500 into America's first continental railroad. It is an almost unbelievable story of a high dream of fortune realized through highhanded practices-an adventure which left the national treasury poorer by millions of swindled dollars, and America itself richer by a national railroad system which contributed greatly to the country's westward expansion.

How did Huntington operate? What were his methods? Was he corrupt? These are questions that were previously unanswered but thanks to the cooperation of the Huntington family who supplied Mr. Lavender with material that had never before been made public, Lavender shows just how Collis P. Huntington operated-and it was defintely outside the law, although well inside the prevailing morality of his time. It shows his complicated dealings with Sanford Hopkins, how he bested such tycoons as Thomas A. Scott, John C. Durrant, Oliver Ames and Jay Gould, how Huntington accumulated the great fortune which was the legacy to his family, and how his great railroad network was to prove an unparalleled legacy to all Americans. The Great Persuader is a powerful story of a remarkable man whose singleness of purpose and ruthless manipulation of men and money propelled the great enterprise forward against all odds.

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cover of Guide to Reference in Business and Economics

Guide to Reference in Business and Economics

Steven W. American Library Association

American Library Association, 2014

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