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Abstract
Businesses focused on transactions conducted over the Internet appeared to mark an entirely new way of doing business in the United States. Amazon.com, the on-line book seller, is a major example of the dot.com business. By the middle of the 1990s, approximately 450 companies appeared in what many referred to as the dot.com revolution. Slightly less than a third of those companies failed with the end of the stock market bubble in 2000. The stocks of these that survived traded well below their historic high share prices. But the dot.com phenomenon is more than a matter of speculation. Dot.com companies were deeply embedded in the recent economic and business history of the United States. They illustrate much about late twentieth-century changes in American business. To understand the rise of these new part of the economy one has to examine the growth of venture capital firms; the political economy of innovation tied to federal spending on the defense and space sectors; and the politics of central bank policy. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]