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For most of the 20th century the Bell System was the American telephone network, from the research labs to the phone you were required to rent. In 1899 its Boston parent, American Bell, was absorbed by its own New York long distance subsidiary, AT&T, to take advantage of friendlier corporate and tax law. When the founding patent expired in 1894, roughly 6,000 independent phone companies sprang up, but they refused to interconnect, leaving businesses with three phones on one desk. Theodore Vail, back as president in 1907, sold the idea of a natural monopoly under the slogan "one policy, one system, universal service," and the 1913 Kingsbury Commitment traded the Western Union stake for decades of regulated peace.

A 1949 antitrust suit ended in the 1956 consent decree, which kept AT&T out of commercial computing and made its existing patents royalty free, including the transistor from Bell Labs. Microwave towers let MCI undercut long distance rates between Chicago and St. Louis, and a 1974 Justice Department suit led to the January 1, 1984 divestiture into seven Baby Bells. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the pieces bought each other back: Southwestern Bell absorbed Pacific Telesis, Ameritech and finally AT&T itself, while Bell Atlantic and NYNEX became Verizon.

• Customers could not attach a non Bell phone without paying the company to rewire it and leasing the device monthly.
• The 1956 decree capped AT&T at 85 percent of the national phone network and forced it to shed Nortel and a 54 percent stake in Japan's NEC.
• The seven Baby Bells were Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell and US West.
• Saul Bass redesigned the Bell logo in 1969; Cincinnati Bell, the last U.S. holdout, rebranded as altafiber in 2022.
• By 2026 AT&T is retiring the copper landline network that the Bell System spent a century building.

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The word stagflation was popularized by British Conservative politician Iain Macleod in a 1965 speech to the House of Commons warning of rising prices and slowing growth together. Postwar Keynesian policy relied on the Phillips curve, a trade-off in which lower unemployment meant higher inflation, so governments believed they could steer between the two. The 1970s broke that model. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the Suez Canal from 1967 to 1975, rerouting shipping around Africa. After Richard Nixon sent about $2.2 billion in military aid to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Arab oil exporters imposed an embargo and oil prices quadrupled, as the Bretton Woods system of gold-backed fixed exchange rates collapsed.

In August 1971 Nixon imposed wage and price controls, which led producers to hold back goods and fed the gas lines, while the U.S. M2 money supply grew close to 15 percent a year. Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps argued that persistent inflation becomes expected, driving a wage-price spiral. Neoclassical economists split the problem into real causes of stagnation and monetary causes of inflation, and Austrian economists pointed to the Cantillon effect. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler proposed differential accumulation, and Jane Jacobs looked to import-replacing cities. The cure came from Fed chairman Paul Volcker, who squeezed the money supply from 1979 to 1983 and pushed prime rates into double digits; unemployment peaked at 10.4 percent in early 1983.

• Macleod described the situation as the worst of both worlds, inflation on one side and stagnation on the other.
• In 1919 John Maynard Keynes quoted Lenin on debauching the currency and warned that price controls lead to barter.
• Modern textbooks treat sticky prices as explaining short-term supply shocks, but prolonged stagflation as a sign of excess money growth.
• Differential accumulation holds that dominant firms raise prices faster than smaller rivals during crises to gain relative power.
• Jacobs argued that nations are political boundaries and that resilience comes from cities that balance local production and imports.

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Redlining was the systemic withholding of home loans and insurance from certain neighborhoods. Economists such as Richard T. Ely theorized about race and property values in the 1920s, and the 1934 National Housing Act created the Federal Housing Administration, whose chief land economist Homer Hoyt wrote the first underwriting criteria. From 1935 the Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew residential security maps for over 200 cities, grading areas green, blue, yellow or red, the last labeled hazardous. About 85 percent of residents of red areas were white, yet those areas held nearly all urban African American households, and only six majority Black neighborhoods escaped the label. FHA manuals warned against inharmonious racial groups, and from 1945 to 1959 Black Americans received under 2 percent of federally insured loans.

Chicago sociologist John McKnight coined the term in the 1960s. Gale Cincotta and Shel Trapp built National People's Action, and in Massachusetts the Dukakis administration forced banks to disclose lending by zip code. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 followed. Lenders then shifted to reverse redlining, pushing subprime and adjustable rate loans into the same areas before 2008, with high-income Black Americans almost twice as likely to get subprime loans as low-income white Americans. Settlements include Bank of America for $335 million in 2011 and Wells Fargo for $184.3 million in 2012.

• Blockbusting agents stoked white homeowners' fears, bought cheaply and resold at a premium to minority families shut out of mortgages.
• Some lenders worked with pastors who preached on wealth building to steer congregations toward toxic loans.
• Formerly redlined areas show higher nitrogen dioxide and PM2.5, including near Philadelphia's Grays Ferry refinery.
• Life expectancy averages 3.6 years lower in redlined areas, and the gap reaches 21 years in one Richmond, Virginia neighborhood.
• A 2019 HUD lawsuit accused Facebook of letting housing advertisers exclude users through proxy categories.

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Henry Clay Frick was born in 1849 in western Pennsylvania, grandson of Old Overholt whiskey founder Abraham Overholt and son of a father with a string of failed businesses. He left Otterbein College after about a year and vowed at 21 to be a millionaire by 30. In 1871 he formed the Frick Coke Company to make coke, the purified fuel steel mills need, with loans from the family of Andrew Mellon. By 1880 he controlled 80 percent of Pennsylvania's coal output, and an 1881 meeting with Andrew Carnegie made him Carnegie's supplier and eventually chairman of Carnegie Steel. He was also a member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which owned an earthen dam holding back Lake Conemaugh above Johnstown.

The club lowered the dam nearly three feet for a wider carriage road and screened the spillway to keep fish in. On May 31, 1889, it collapsed and the flood killed over 2,200 people; members funded relief, agreed not to discuss the club, and fended off lawsuits by calling it an act of God. In 1892, running the Homestead mill while Carnegie was in Scotland, Frick locked out the union behind a fence workers called Fort Frick and sent 300 Pinkertons up the river by barge. The July 5 battle left 10 dead. On July 23 the anarchist Alexander Berkman shot Frick twice in the neck and stabbed him, and public sympathy shifted to Frick. He later sued Carnegie, helped found U.S. Steel and collected art in New York.

• A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers on the dam was delayed two years and left out the lowered crest and fish screen.
• Carnegie Steel vice president John G. A. Leishman grabbed Berkman's arm and spoiled a third shot.
• Frick later had Leishman eased out of Carnegie Steel's presidency through a diplomatic post in Switzerland.
• Frick and his wife Adelaide canceled their Titanic passage after she sprained her ankle in Italy.
• He died in 1919 and left Pittsburgh land and $2 million for Frick Park, $6 million to Princeton and the Frick Collection.

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In 1967 a 28-year-old designer was working for the tie maker Beau Brummell, selling wide neckties out of a single drawer in a showroom in the Empire State Building and delivering them to stores himself. He persuaded the company's president to let him launch his own menswear line, named it Polo in 1968, and in 1969 won an exclusive deal with Bloomingdale's in Manhattan, which gave him his own in-store shop, the first time it had done so for a designer. In 1971 he put a small polo player emblem on the cuff of a line of tailored women's shirts, and in 1972 he opened his first freestanding store on Rodeo Drive and released the short sleeve cotton logo shirt in 24 colors.

He dressed Robert Redford, including a pink suit, for The Great Gatsby in 1974, and Diane Keaton and Woody Allen for Annie Hall in 1977. In 1978 he became the first designer to launch men's and women's fragrances at once, opened in London in 1981 and took over the Rhinelander Mansion in New York in 1986. The company went public in 1997. It fought parodies and sued Levi Strauss, but an unrelated company owns the Polo trademark in South Africa. After nearly 50 years he stepped down as CEO in 2015 while staying executive chairman and chief creative officer; Stefan Larsson left in 2017 over differences in vision, and Patrice Louvet took over.

• The polo player logo was inspired by a real player named Benny Gutierrez.
• A 1984 parody horse shirt case was settled out of court, with the maker agreeing to stop.
• In 2009 the company apologized for digitally thinning a photo of model Filippa Hamilton.
• It dropped the Cowichan name from sweaters in 2015 after complaints from the Cowichan Tribes.
• In 2023 a Canadian ombudsperson and European researchers investigated allegations of Uyghur forced labor in its supply chain.

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The Cayman Islands are the coral-capped peaks of the submerged Cayman Ridge, beside the Cayman Trough, which drops to about 20,000 feet. The highest point, The Bluff on Cayman Brac, is 43 meters above sea level. Columbus named them Las Tortugas in 1503 for their sea turtles, which sailors later hunted to near extinction, and the name that stuck comes from the crocodiles in the mangroves. With no rivers and thin soil, the islands had no indigenous population. Pirates, shipwrecked sailors and British Army deserters settled them; the first recorded resident, Isaac Bodden, was born around 1661. England took control in 1670 under the Treaty of Madrid, and when Jamaica became independent in 1962 the Caymans stayed British.

A legend grew from the 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail, when islanders rescued the crews of a merchant convoy: that King George III rewarded them with a promise of no taxes. No record supports it, but in the 1960s the islands legislated no income, corporate or capital gains tax. Today Ugland House in George Town is the registered address of over 12,000 corporations, the territory hosts over 100,000 companies for about 81,000 people, and financial services and tourism make up 50 to 60 percent of GDP. The government instead relies on import duties of 22 to 25 percent on most goods and up to 100 percent on cars. Barack Obama called Ugland House a tax scam, and the islands signed legal assistance treaties with the United States.

• The endemic blue iguana is critically threatened, with introduced agoutis, dogs and cats preying on its eggs and young.
• Royal land grants in the 1730s brought enslaved Africans to the islands, and slavery was abolished in 1833.
• Under the 2021 census, non-Caymanians made up 56 percent of the workforce and immigrants 52.5 percent of the population.
• Jamaicans are the largest immigrant group, close to 25 percent of the population, and work permits carry term limits.
• In 2004 Hurricane Ivan struck as a Category 5 storm and damaged or destroyed an estimated 83 percent of dwellings on Grand Cayman.

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In 1948 Glen Bell was running Bell's Drive-In, a hot dog stand in San Bernardino, California, while lines wrapped around the Mitla Cafe across the street for its dorado tacos, corn tortillas folded around meat and fried whole. After struggling to copy them, he was invited into the cafe's kitchen and taught the technique by its head chef, and the Mitla Cafe still operates today. From 1951 he tested stands under names like Taco Tia and El Taco. On July 6, 1962, he opened the first Taco Bell in Downey: a 400 square foot building with mission-style arches, a walk-up window, no seating and every item, from tacos to a loose meat chili burger, priced at 19 cents.

Former police officer Kermit Becky bought the first franchise in 1964 and opened in Torrance in 1965. The 100th store opened in Anaheim in 1967, and in 1968 store 258 in Springfield, Ohio, crossed the Mississippi. Bell sold to PepsiCo in 1978, which converted regional chains such as Taco Charley, Pup N' Taco and Zantigo into Taco Bells, dropped much of the original architecture in 1984 and retired the chili burger, briefly renamed the Bell Beefer. The chain later became part of Yum Brands, launched Doritos Locos Tacos with Frito-Lay in 2012, and twice failed in Mexico. In 2015 it saved the original Downey building from demolition and trucked it 45 miles to its Irvine headquarters.

• A 1992 launch in Mexico City closed within two years, and a 2007 Monterrey attempt that added french fries closed by 2010.
• Taco Bell opened Cantina locations with DJs and alcohol and performs weddings at its Las Vegas flagship.
• The Bell, a 2019 pop-up hotel in California, booked out in two minutes.
• In August 2025 the company scaled back AI drive-through ordering after the system accepted an order for 18,000 waters.
• Users also found they could order McDonald's items through the AI, which refused simple swaps like beans for meat.

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Thierry Hermès, born in 1801 in Krefeld to a French father and German mother, trained as a saddler and harness maker in Pont-Audemer and opened a Paris workshop near La Madeleine in 1837. He made carriage harnesses, not fashion, using the saddle stitch, in which two needles cross a single linen thread through each hole so the seam holds even if one stitch breaks. His harnesses won a first-class medal at the 1867 Exposition Universelle. His son Charles-Émile moved the business in 1880 to 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, still the headquarters. His grandson Émile-Maurice, visiting the United States during World War I, saw cars replacing horses and secured exclusive French rights to the zipper for leather goods.

Émile-Maurice designed handbags in 1922 after his wife could not find one she liked, and the silk carrés arrived in 1937. Robert Dumas's 1930s document bag became the Kelly bag after Grace Kelly was photographed shielding her pregnancy with it, and orange packaging came from wartime shortages of other dyes. Jean-Louis Dumas, in charge from 1978, sketched the Birkin with Jane Birkin on a flight in 1984, hired Martin Margiela and Jean-Paul Gaultier, and listed the company in 1993 with the family keeping 80 percent. In 2010 LVMH revealed a 17.1 percent stake built through cash-settled equity swaps, and family heirs pooled 50.2 percent of the capital into a holding company called H51. LVMH backed off in 2014.

• The first zippered leather golf jacket, made in 1918, was for the Prince of Wales.
• Each heavy silk twill scarf uses roughly 300 mulberry moth cocoons.
• Jane Birkin and Jean-Louis Dumas drew the first Birkin sketch on an airline sickness bag.
• Under sixth-generation CEO Axel Dumas, revenue hit 16 billion euros with no assembly lines and one artisan per bag.
• The company owns crocodile farms in Australia, which have drawn criticism from PETA, and says it meets international welfare standards.

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In 1938, under Japanese rule, Lee Byung-chul opened Samsung Sanghoe in Daegu with 40 employees, trading dried fish and noodles. The name means three stars, chosen to signal something big and eternal. The Korean War wiped out his Seoul business, and he rebuilt with a sugar refinery in Busan and, by 1954, the country's largest woolen mill, helped by state-backed loans to favored industrialists. In 1972 the first Samsung-branded black and white TV came off the line in Suwon while Lee also owned the Tongyang Broadcasting Company, until the government forced the network shut in 1980. The family ran the group through circular cross-shareholdings that gave it control with a small personal stake.

After Lee died in 1987 the group split into five, and the core went to his third son, Lee Kun-hee. At a 1993 meeting in Frankfurt he told executives to change everything except their wives and kids, shifting Samsung from cheap volume to quality. It became the top memory chip maker, built towers including Taipei 101 and the Burj Khalifa, shed its car unit to Renault in the 1997 crisis and passed Nokia in phones by 2012. In 2007 former Samsung lawyer Kim Yong-chul alleged thousands of secret accounts and a slush fund stored in art. Lee Kun-hee was convicted and then pardoned in 2009, and his son Lee Jae-yong was imprisoned for bribery and embezzlement and later pardoned. In May 2026 Samsung reached a $1 trillion valuation.

• A 1947 joint venture with Cho Hong-jai dissolved within a few years over equity and management disputes.
• Samsung's textile arm invested in the hip-hop brand FUBU in 1995 after its founder placed a newspaper ad seeking funding.
• The government justified Lee Kun-hee's pardon by his International Olympic Committee role in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics bid.
• In 2022 Samsung's revenue equaled 22.4 percent of South Korea's GDP, fueling the phrase Republic of Samsung.
• Samsung lost a $1.05 billion patent case to Apple in 2012 and canceled the fire-prone Galaxy Note 7 in 2016.

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In October 2007 San Francisco roommates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia could not make rent while a design conference had filled every hotel, so they rented air mattresses on their living room floor and served breakfast. In 2008 they added former roommate Nathan Blecharczyk as CTO and launched Airbed and Breakfast that August. With no investors interested, they sold Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's cereal boxes at $40 each around the 2008 election and raised $30,000. Paul Graham took them into Y Combinator in early 2009 for $20,000 and a 6 percent stake, told them to do things that don't scale, and they flew to New York to photograph listings themselves. By March 2009 they had 10,000 users and the shorter name Airbnb.

Venture money from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and TPG pushed the valuation to $30 billion by 2016, funding acquisitions such as Crashpadder, Luxury Retreats and HotelTonight for $400 million. Cities pushed back: Amsterdam and London capped rental days, Paris set 120 days, Barcelona voted to ban short-term rentals by 2028, and New York barred stays under 30 days unless the host is present. The company canceled Washington, D.C. bookings around the 2021 inauguration, left domestic China in 2022 and reversed a ban on West Bank settlement listings. When COVID-19 cut bookings by up to 96 percent it laid off a quarter of its staff, then went public in December 2020, raising $3.5 billion at a $100 billion valuation.

• A Lisbon moratorium on short-term rentals mainly pushed up hotel prices rather than lowering local housing costs.
• Victims of hidden cameras and violence at rentals have sued the platform for negligence.
• Co-founder Joe Gebbia's move to the Department of Government Efficiency in 2025 triggered user boycotts.
• A global party ban in 2022 used software that weighs a guest's age, distance from home, stay length and day of week.
• Revenue reached $12.2 billion in 2025, and the app now books chefs, massage therapists and trainers.