American Economics

The American Dream is close to being replaced by a living nightmare. Key commodities that are essential to our daily lives and that are widely believed to be abundant are running critically short. Even worse, the Chinese are doing what they can to monopolize the world's dwindling resources. The U.S. is now largely dependent on our greatest economic rival for rare earth elements as well as a host of other minerals - all of which are absolutely essential to the development of alternative energies....

Instead of going where other journalists have gone in search of this story - the board rooms and trading floors of the big Wall Street firms - Scheer goes back to Washington, D.C., a veritable crime scene, beginning in the 1980s, where the captains of the finance industry, their lobbyists and allies among leading politicians destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning effectively since the era of the New Deal.

For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 describes the African American struggle to obtain equal rights in the workplace and organized labor's response to their demands. Award-winning historian Robert H. Zieger asserts that the promise of jobs was similar to the 40-acres-and-a-mule restitution pledged to African Americans during the Reconstruction era. The inconsistencies between rhetoric and action encouraged workers, both men and women, to organize themselves into unions to fight against unfair hiring practices and workplace discrimination.

Robber Barons and Wretched Refuse explores the connection between the so-called robber barons who led American big businesses during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and the immigrants who composed many of their workforces.

A lyrical work of narrative nonfiction that portrays how the largest domestic oil discovery in half a century transformed a forgotten corner of the American West into a crucible of breakneck capitalism. As North Dakota became the nation's second-largest oil producer, Maya Rao set out in steel-toe boots to join a wave of drifters, dreamers, entrepreneurs, and criminals. With an eye for the dark, absurd, and humorous, Rao fearlessly immersed herself in their world to chronicle this modern-day gold rush, from its heady beginnings to OPEC's price war against the US oil industry.

IBM is in serious trouble. Big Blue, as the company is known, tends to rely for its success on magical thinking but that magic ran out a long time ago. The company got in trouble back in the 1990s and had to hire for the first time an outside CEO, Lou Gerstner, to save the day. Gerstner pushed IBM into services with spectacular results but this hurt the company, too. As services have became commoditized IBM could only compete by offshoring the work and quality suffered.

Every day of the week in contemporary America (and especially on Sundays) people raise money for their religious enterprises - for clergy, educators, buildings, charity, youth-oriented work, and more. In a fascinating look into the economics of American Protestantism, James Hudnut-Beumler examines how churches have raised and spent money from colonial times to the present and considers what these practices say about both religion and American culture.

Mass Motorization and Mass Transit examines how the United States became the world's most thoroughly motorized nation and why mass transit has been more displaced in the United States than in any other advanced industrial nation. The book's historical and international perspective provides a uniquely effective framework for understanding both the intensity of US motorization and the difficulties the country will face in moderating its demands on the world's oil supply and reducing the CO2 emissions generated by motor vehicles.

In his first book, American Underdog, David Brat examines how we brought down the status quo by tapping in to moral and economic lessons as old as our civilization and discusses how Washington can learn from history instead of ignoring it. A fighter for children, he illuminates how our current fiscal policies are selling their future and outlines new ways to move forward with a conservative agenda that provides fairer treatment for all.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the stagnation of living standards has become the defining trend of American life. Life expectancy has declined, economic inequality has soared, and, after some progress, the Black-white wage gap is once again as large as it was in the 1950s. How did this happen in the world's most powerful country? And what happened to the "American dream"? Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Leonhardt examines the past century of American history, from the Great Depression to today's Great Stagnation, in search of an answer.

In The Fix Was On, Murray Rothbard discusses why the United States replaced specie with fiat currency; the early days of American banking after the Revolutionary War; early central banks and the ultimate creation of the Federal Reserve; and how the Federal Reserve causes the boom/bust business cycle.

Prepare to conquer the CLEP History of the United States I: Early Colonization to 1877 Exam with this comprehensive study guide. Delve into essential topics such as political institutions, political developments, and public policy, gaining insights into the shaping of America's governance. Explore social developments that have influenced the nation's identity and fabric. Unravel the intricacies of economic developments, from early colonial trade to industrialization. Dive into cultural and intellectual developments that have defined American society. Additionally, examine the nation's ...

The Patrons of Husbandry - or the Grange - is the longest-lived US agricultural society and, since its founding shortly after the Civil War, has had immeasurable influence on social change as enacted by ordinary Americans. The Grange sought to relieve the struggles of small farmers by encouraging collaboration. Pathbreaking for its inclusion of women, the Grange is also well known for its association with Gilded Age laws aimed at curbing the monopoly power of railroads.

Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point. Interweaving her own experience, Allen shares surprising stories of hope and ingenuity.

The author tells the history of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, how it grew much too quickly, why it failed and the impact on Black America. The end of slavery in the United States left thousands of enslaved people with the need to survive the transition to freedom, including food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. They would also need education, money and financial services. In 1865 Congress passed legislation to create the Freedman’s Bureau to provide those services. It also created the Freedman’s Savings Bank. Large numbers of the formerly enslaved people had been paid for service ...

In 1980, Exxon U.S.A., the world's largest corporation, began development of a five-billion-dollar oil shale industry in the pristine Colorado River Valley. Within eighteen months, Exxon had canceled its elaborate Colony project and 2,100 workers were immediately laid off. Boomtown Blues chronicles the social, environmental, and economic havoc created by one of the most expensive boom and bust cycles in the history of the American West.

Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read "You ain't the boss of me".

In this monumental book by one of the Church’s greatest contemporary defenders, Bill Donohue explains how the ruling class is systematically undermining the virtues that have built Western civilization and producing a “moral holocaust” that the traditional family cannot withstand.

The 2008 financial crisis crystallized for people around the country the fact that something was wrong. Americans had already been losing faith in elites who had failed to protect them from crisis after crisis and disaster after disaster. After the collapse, we expected someone to have a solution but were inevitably disappointed. Instead, we got high and rising unemployment, foreclosures spiraling out of control, and, as the protest chant went, "banks got bailed out, we got sold out."

Just as the industrial capitalism of the 19th century gave way to corporate capitalism in the 20th, recent decades have witnessed corporate capitalism evolving into a new phase, which Ehrenreich calls "Third Wave Capitalism." Third Wave Capitalism is marked by apparent contradictions: Rapid growth in productivity and lagging wages; fabulous wealth for the one percent and the persistence of high levels of poverty; increases in the standard of living and increases in mental illness, and much more.