My Tuesday evenings have recently been filled thanks to the entertainment provided by the very nice people at the History channel. I’ve been thoroughly entranced by the show, The Men Who Built America. Production quality aside, it’s really an incredible feat, on reflection, how a TV channel could founder so spectacularly in presenting a “reality show” purporting to be a documentary.

As the History channel describes the program on its website: “John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and J. P. Morgan rose from obscurity and in the process built modern America.... These men created the American Dream and were the engine of capitalism as they transformed everything they touched.... Their paths crossed repeatedly as they elected presidents, set economic policies, and influenced major events.... Using state-of-the-art, computer-generated imagery that incorporates 12 million historical negatives, many made available for the first time by the Library of Congress, this series will bring back to life the world they knew and the one they created.”

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