Supreme City, Donald L. Miller
Supreme City, Donald L. Miller
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Supreme City
How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America

Author: Donald L. Miller

Narrator: Jim Frangione

Unabridged: 29 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 05/06/2014


Synopsis

While F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, Manhattan was transformed by jazz, night clubs, radio, skyscrapers, movies, and the ferocious energy of the 1920s, as this illuminating cultural history brilliantly demonstrates. In four words-- "the capital of everything"-- Duke Ellington captured Manhattan during one of the most exciting and celebrated eras in our history: the Jazz Age. Radio, tabloid newspapers, and movies with sound appeared. The silver screen took over Times Square as Broadway became America's movie mecca. Tremendous new skyscrapers were built in Midtown in one of the greatest building booms in history. Supreme City is the story of Manhattan' s growth and transformation in the 1920s and the brilliant people behind it. Nearly all of the makers of modern Manhattan came from elsewhere: Walter Chrysler from the Kansas prairie; entertainment entrepreneur Florenz Ziegfeld from Chicago. William Paley, founder of the CBS radio network, was from Philadelphia, while his rival David Sarnoff, founder of NBC, was a Russian immigrant. Cosmetics queen Elizabeth Arden was Canadian and her rival, Helena Rubenstein, Polish. All of them had in common vaulting ambition and a desire to fulfill their dreams in New York. As mass communication emerged, the city moved from downtown to midtown through a series of engineering triumphs-- Grand Central Terminal and the new and newly chic Park Avenue it created, the Holland Tunnel, and the modern skyscraper. In less than ten years Manhattan became the social, cultural, and commercial hub of the country. The 1920s was the Age of Jazz and the Age of Ambition. Original in concept, deeply researched, and utterly fascinating, Supreme City transports readers to that time and to the city which outsiders embraced, in E.B. White' s words, "with the intense excitement of first love."

About Donald L. Miller

Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History Emeritus at Lafayette College and author of ten books, including Vicksburg, and Masters of the Air, currently being made into a television series by Tom Hanks. He has hosted, coproduced, or served as historical consultant for more than thirty television documentaries and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Brian on November 06, 2019

This book is long, but its length is in the service of being comprehensive. The reader really breathes the air of that time of possibility with the figures the author profiles, is at their elbow as they make the crucial and risky decisions which bit by bit constructed the modern age.......more

Goodreads review by Tom on June 28, 2014

If Miller is correct (...and I think he is!) New York is the modern Rome, and all roads have led FROM her, starting in the 1920s! Thus wonderful, complex books illustrates the complex jigsaw puzzle that is and was NYC and how that hothouse environment fostered change is everything from business to j......more

Goodreads review by Martin on February 12, 2016

The richest city in the richest country in the world, the Great War had displaced London’s financial capital to New York. The city was already self-sufficient through mostly real estate tax, and real estate speculation and the economy of building kept the city financially strong and ever-growing. Pr......more