"Out Where the West Begins: Profiles, Visions, and Strategies of Early Western Business Leaders" By Philip Anschutz, Thomas Noel, and William Joseph Convery (2015).
Philip Frederick Anschutz (born December 28, 1939) is an American billionaire businessman who owns or controls companies in a variety of industries, including energy, railroads, real estate, sports, newspapers, movies, theaters, arenas and music. In 2004, he purchased the parent company of the Journal Newspapers, which under Anschutz's direction became the American conservative editorial newspaper Washington Examiner.
. . .Anschutz is an active philanthropist. He heads the Anschutz Foundation, and was listed 41st on the Forbes 400 list in October 2019, with a net worth of $11.5 billion.
Anschutz and his wife have contributed over $100 million to the new medical, dental, physical therapy, physician assistan, nursing, and pharmacy campus of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, Colorado, now named the Anschutz Medical Campus in their honor. The land came from the recently closed Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, but millions were needed for the construction of new medical laboratory buildings and a new University Hospital on the land. They have also donated to the University of Kansas, their alma mater. There is an Anschutz Library and an Anschutz Sports Pavilion. In recognition of their philanthropic efforts, the Anschutzes received the 2009 William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership.
. . .Anschutz has granted only three formal interviews since 1979, and none from the 1980s until 2015. On December 6, 2015, he broke his media silence when he appeared with several of the founders of Major League Soccer to reflect on the league's 20th anniversary.
"In 1800, you remember, that almost nothing was known by almost anyone west of the Mississippi river. . .Very few people had ever gone west, and it was unknown territory, and by the way, in many respects, it wasn't friendly territory. It was still being contested. Keep in mind that this was a small moment in time but America as we knew it at that time was surrounded by four very large powers; Spain, the English, France, and Russia. Very large countries, they all had standing armies, they all had their eyes upon the prize of this new country of ours. But something happened, and you know what that was? It was Napoleon primarily. All four of those countries were tied down in a land war during this time period. So I picked 1800 to 1920, and as I said almost nothing was known at that time, but a hundred and twenty years later, a mere blink of an eye in historical terms, the area going west from the Mississippi was the 4th or 5th largest industrial power in the world. From nothing." - Philip Anschutz from the interview below.
An excerpt from, "How the Louisiana Purchase Changed the World" By Joseph A. Harriss, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2003:
The Louisiana Purchase, made 200 years ago this month, nearly doubled the size of the United States. By any measure, it was one of the most colossal land transactions in history, involving an area larger than today’s France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland and the British Isles combined. All or parts of 15 Western states would eventually be carved from its nearly 830,000 square miles, which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. And the price, $15 million, or about four cents an acre, was a breathtaking bargain. “Let the Land rejoice,” Gen. Horatio Gates, a prominent New York state legislator, told President Thomas Jefferson when details of the deal reached Washington, D.C. “For you have bought Louisiana for a song.”
American historians today are more outspoken in their enthusiasm for the acquisition. “With the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, this is one of the threethings that created the modern United States,” says Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans and coauthor with the late Stephen E. Ambrose of The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation. Charles A. Cerami, author of Jefferson’s Great Gamble, agrees. “If we had not made this purchase, it would have pinched off the possibility of our becoming a continental power,” he says. “That, in turn, would have meant our ideas on freedom and democracy would have carried less weight with the rest of the world. This was the key to our international influence.”
Video Title: Philip Anschutz Part 1. Source: Aaron Harber. Date Published: Jul 9, 2016.
