Amazon just delivered John Steele Gordon's An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (2004), and abebooks.com sent a used copy of his The Business of America: Tales from the Marketplace (2001).

Empire begins with a wonderful quotation from Robert E. Lee:

The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of an individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing ways, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

(Letter to Charles Marshall, ca. 1866) (But quare: should "ways" be "waves"? Google produces no help on the question.)