Standard Oil: America's First Corporate Monopoly

In 1870, John D. Rockefeller founded a company that would come to control nearly 90 percent of American oil refining within a decade. Standard Oil was not simply a business success-it was a new kind of power, one that operated outside the boundaries of existing law, rewrote the rules of American commerce, and forced a nation to confront a question it had never seriously asked: how much power could...