From our first IPO -- the European fund-raising that launched America's colonization -- through today's mass obsession with the Dow and Nasdaq, Eyewitness to Wall Street brims with accounts from people who saw it happen -- poets and speculators, patriots and criminals, politicians and reporters -- including Daniel Defoe, Mark Twain, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Muriel Siebert, Warren Buffet, Connie Bruck, Christopher Buckley and Michael Lewis. Their accounts reveal the myriad ways that Wall Street has served not only as the epicenter of American finance but as a major factor in the larger events of American history, from the way Wall Street traders saved the Continental Army from bankruptcy and helped finance the Union during the Civil War to how Americans were suckered by the bull market of early 1929, and struggled through the rebuilding of modern Wall Street.

More than half of the book is devoted to the contemporary era, defined by the "greed is good" 1980s, the bull market 1990s, and the Internet millionaires and inflated markets of the twenty-first century's beginning. But whether it's a description of how Wall Street took its name from a wall of logs in New Amsterdam or a look at our present-day market mania, the eyewitnesses collected here share a knack for revealing the human side of business.

Through the firsthand reports of those who experienced the manias, panics and crashes, Eyewitness to Wall Street
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