fifty years in wall street

a highly recommended book on the history of us finance and some of the big names and players during the latter half of the 19th century is out of copyright and available for free online. it's a heft tome (~1000 pages) but you can get plain text, pdf with scanned images, or djvu files here or here. the plain text looks like it was ocr and is pretty good quality, though might cause some problems with tts.