"Most great figures in American history reveal great contradictions, and Henry Ford is no exception. He championed his workers, offering unprecedented wages, yet crushed their attempts to organize. Virulently anti-Semitic, he never employed fewer than 3,000 Jews. An outspoken pacifist, he made...

From an acclaimed popular historian comes a fresh, meticulous, and entertaining account of Henry Ford and his invention of the Model-T--the machine that defined the dawning age in America. Every century or so, our republic has been changed by a new technology: 170 years ago it was the railroad;...