How does a 46-year-old widow with no income, two sons to support, and only a high school education survive? If you are Katharine Gibbs, you found a secretarial school in 1911 that becomes the best in the world and gives women the ability to support themselves. Katharine Gibbs was CEO of three schools two years before women could vote. She was an entrepreneur who educated women for business when they were not welcome. She created her school in hostile times when a Harvard Medical School doctor said that higher education could cause the uterus to atrophy! After her death, the family fostered the icon of Gibbs excellence worldwide and added Chicago, Bermuda, and suburban New Jersey campuses. Gordon Gibbs, son of the founder, said, "This is not my school or my family's; it's a national institution." The national institution underwent many changes in its one hundred years. The last owners were large corporations who kept the core tradition of excellence. Multiple campuses, new programs of study, the introduction of degrees, and male students remade Gibbs with adaptability reminiscent of the founder. The Gibbs family motto Tenax proposit, Hold to your purpose, motivated graduates from 1911 to 2011. The stories of Gibbs graduates-bank president, college president, US ambassador, CIA operatives, lawyers, writers, graphic designers, professionals in many fields-are told in each chapter.

A riveting story of ambition, greed, and genius unfolding at the dawn of modern America. This landmark biography brings into focus a fascinating brilliant entrepreneur—like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, a true American visionary—who risked everything to realize his bold dream of a Hollywood empire. Although a major Hollywood studio still bears William Fox’s name, the man himself has mostly been forgotten by history, even written off as a failure. Now, in this fascinating biography, Vanda Krefft corrects the record, explaining why Fox’s legacy is central to the history of Hollywood. At the heart of William Fox’s life was the myth of the American Dream. His story intertwines the fate of the nineteenth-century immigrants who flooded into New York, the city’s vibrant and ruthless gilded age history, and the birth of America’s movie industry amid the dawn of the modern era. Drawing on a decade of original research, The Man Who Made the Movies offers a rich, compelling look at a complex man emblematic of his time, one of the most fascinating and formative eras in American history. Growing up in Lower East Side tenements, the eldest son of impoverished Hungarian immigrants, Fox began selling candy on the street. That entrepreneurial ambition eventually grew one small Brooklyn theater into a $300 million empire of deluxe studios and theaters that rivaled those of Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, and the Warner brothers, and launched stars such as Theda Bara. Amid the euphoric roaring twenties, the early movie moguls waged a fierce battle for control of their industry. A fearless risk-taker, Fox won and was hailed as a genius—until a confluence of circumstances, culminating with the 1929 stock market crash, led to his ruin.

"A lively, unexpected portrait of the jet-age stewardesses serving on iconic Pan Am airways between 1966 and 1975"--