This book is less about particular financial transactions and more about understanding the process the US economy uses to adapt to change. Part One surveys the broad sweep of merger history, from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. Part Two focuses more closely on the strategy and tactics behind some active industries in the 1980s and 1990s and the deals that transformed them. Part Three describes the implementation of the modern transaction. Because the scope of this book is so broad, it cannot purport to be exhaustive. The intent is rather to provide a sensitivity and a context for an appreciation of the traits of an important part of their economic history and an inevitable phenomenon.