Provide a brief statement on the work Andrew Carnegie was doing at the turn of the last century.

Andrew Carnegie was one of the most successful American businessmen in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Born into a poor Scottish family, Carnegie was able to work his way up in American society, eventually investing heavily in railroads and related industries in preCivil War America, and ultimately becoming one of the preeminent investors of his time. By the late 1880s, Carnegie shifted some of his attention to philanthropy, arguing that industrialists should distribute the wealth that they had acquired to benevolent causes. In 1892 , with the founding of the Carnegie Steel Company (later renamed US Steel), Carnegie became a dominant figure in the steel industry. Its sale in 1901 brought Carnegie $480 million, which he spent his last 15 years giving away to charitable causes. Carnegie particularly favored giving to libraries and universities. In 1889 , Carnegie made a general call to other wealthy industrialists to distribute their money for the betterment of society. Noting that "the problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship," Carnegie urged that the wealthy put their money back into society to achieve the greater good. Particularly worrisome for Carnegie was the pattern of the wealthy passing on their fortunes to heirs, who often wasted them without doing any good for society. Yet for Carnegie, even giving one's wealth to a charity was no guarantee that it would ultimately be used wisely and in accordance with the wishes of the benefactor. Therefore, Carnegie called for the creation of a new form of charity that operated on the principle of "teaching a man to fish" rather than simply "giving him a fish." By supporting the creation of public libraries and universities, Carnegie provided people with tools needed to better themselves, while also requiring the locality to support ongoing operational costs after the initial grant was used up, thereby ensuring that the investment was a wise one. Andrew Carnegie is often considered a traditional philanthropist, a man who accumulated vast wealth in America's gilded age and gave large sums to elite institutions. In reality, his approach to giving was highly entrepreneurial: betting on enormous returns and fraught with risk. Carnegie sought to create social value not directly, but-indirectly by letting others lift themselves up. In this way, he aimed to leverage his giving not by placing a short-term patch over a societal problem with direct aid, but rather by making people more able to take care of themselves. This was a risky strategy, of course, because he had little control over the behavior of those to whom he was extending his philanthropy-success depended on their initiative, not his. Yet, as we 188 now know, his philanthropic venture was hugely successful, raising the educational attainment of millions of Americans