Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean

The U.S. conquest of Puerto Rico was relatively painless—“a picnic,” as one journalist put it. But if Puerto Ricans had avoided the horrors of war, they met something similar the following year, when a category-4 hurricane slammed into the island. Whole coffee plantations washed down the mountains. Thousands of people were killed, more left homeles

The Bahamas took a distinctly different course in relationship to the history of money-making than much of the region. African Americans who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War settled there to be free. Many of them came from the Low Country. In 1818, Great Britain declared that all enslaved Africans who set foot in the Bahamas would be

they too now saw looming before them the prospect of a mighty transcontinental railroad. This, the prize of what for most of them was their homeland, was the Canadian Pacific (CP). For George Stephen and Donald Smith, the CP would become the royal road to the highest ranks of Canadian and British society; but for James J. Hill and John S. Kennedy,

In less than six years after it was finished, having covered all costs (including five years of major improvements from one end of the line to the other—new bridges, improved embankments) the railroad cleared more than $7 million. Stock dividends for nearly twenty years averaged 15 percent and went as high as 44 percent in 1868.