American Industry

We think of transplant surgery as one of the medical wonders of the modern world. But transplant surgery is as ancient as the pyramids, with a history more surprising than we might expect. Paul Craddock takes us on a journey—from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants—uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, Spare Parts explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal, and machine.

Dr. Christine Montross has spent her career treating the most severely ill psychiatric patients. Several years ago, she set out to investigate why so many of her patients got caught up in the legal system when discharged from her care - and what happened to them therein. Waiting for an Echo is a riveting, rarely seen glimpse into American incarceration. It is also a damning account of policies that have criminalized mental illness, shifting large numbers of people who belong in therapeutic settings into punitive ones.

In Chicago, aka "Chiraq", the first 10 days of 2016 yielded 120 people shot. Baltimore's 2015 ended as its bloodiest and deadliest year - on a per capita basis. In 2014 Detroit's police chief called upon law-abiding citizens to take arms against its burgeoning violent, criminal subculture. Unfortunately these cities aren't anomalies. Year after year a seemingly unshakable reality of violence plagues Black communities nationwide.

Mama Might Be Better Off Dead immerses listeners in the lives of four generations of a poor, African-American family in the neighborhood, who are beset with the devastating illnesses that are all too common in America's inner-cities. Headed by Jackie Banes, who oversees the care of a diabetic grandmother, a husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father, and three children, the Banes family contends with countless medical crises.

The tumultuous Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937 was the birth of the United Auto Workers, which set the standard for wages in every industry. Midnight in Vehicle City tells the gripping story of how workers defeated General Motors, the largest industrial corporation in the world. Their victory ushered in the golden age of the American middle class and created a new kind of America, one in which every worker had a right to a share of the company’s wealth.

The American health-care system is failing us. It is a frustratingly complex, opaque, and unaffordable system that results in suboptimal care and a deterioration of the welfare of the majority of American families. The experience of the past few decades and the recent ravaging pandemic has shown us that doing more of the same is not going to deliver us from this dilemma. But there is hope. There is a way to create a more accessible, consumer-friendly, safer, and affordable system of care for all of us.

Switzerland County has its origins in the original wine making Swiss immigrants that migrated into the Ohio River Valley in the early Nineteenth Century. These families were an important part of United States wine making history, as they produced the first commercial wines in the nation. New Switzerland The immigrants named their principal town Vevay, after the Swiss town from which most of them originated. The industrious settlers soon turned the hills and valleys of their new settlement, often called New Switzerland, into productive farms and vineyards. Hay Farming Blight ruined the vines...

In The Company Town, Hardy Green, who has covered American business for over a decade, offers a compelling analysis of the emergence of these communities and their role in shaping the American economy, beginning in the country's earliest years....

Between the years 1918 and 1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least 50 million people, more than half a million of them Americans. Yet despite the devastation, this catastrophic event seems but a forgotten moment in our nation's past. American Pandemic offers a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak.

The American health insurance system is anything but simple to maneuver. Health plan enrollees become entangled in an intricate and opaque maze of confusion, often resulting in frustration, regret, and deep debt. Health plan and health care technology veteran Marc S. Ryan seeks to demystify the US health care system, helping Americans become wiser consumers and allowing them to navigate the maze with more confidence and certainty. Using his decades of experience, Marc outlines a bipartisan blueprint to transform America’s unique system without upending the employer-based system.

The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor-relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought and ranged across all of the major industries of the region. Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is today.

This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic - along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past three decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

During the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history, Mather convinced Doctor Boylston to try a procedure that he believed would prevent death - by making an incision in the arm of a healthy person and implanting it with smallpox. "Inoculation" led to vaccination, one of the most profound medical discoveries in history.

The inspiring story of a Black doctor who was deeply affected by the violence that plagued his Brooklyn childhood and later dedicated himself to addressing trauma and violence as public health issues....

This is the spellbinding tale of a mysterious doctor who revolutionized neonatal care more than 100 years ago and saved some 7,000 babies. Dr. Martin Couney's story is a kaleidoscopic ride through the intersection of ebullient entrepreneurship, enlightened pediatric care, and the wild culture of world's fairs at the beginning of the American Century.

Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology: the state mental asylum system in which psychiatry was born and whose influences extend into our troubled present.

The hypocrisy of U.S. democracy and self-righteous foreign policy is troubling the world. The U.S. Dept of Defense, the world's largest landlord, operates 737 military bases in 63 countries with military personnel in 156 nations. America is ready to strike any country to procure natural resources to extend its empire, keep the dollar afloat, and ensure its utopia. The military-industrial complex has put over 80,000 innocent Iraqis and 4,000 U.S. troops in an early grave, while putting itself in $9 trillion in debt. Alienating humanity and creating new terrorists daily, American foreign ...

In November 1942, Paul Andrew Kennedy (1912-1993) boarded the St. Elena in New York Harbor and sailed for Casablanca as part of Operation Torch, the massive Allied invasion of North Africa. As a member of the US Army's 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group, he spent the next 34 months working in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, in close proximity to the front lines and often under air or artillery bombardment. He was uncomfortable, struck by the sorrows of war, and homesick for his wife.

Elle Jamison is engaged to popular R&B singer GT Wells. The pair fell in love and vowed to be there for each other no matter what. So, when an opportunity arose, Elle put her dreams of becoming a singer on hold, while GT pursued his dreams. She thought they were well on their way to starting their lives together until the fame went to his head. What started off as a fairy tale is now a nightmare filled with paternity tests, groupies, and disrespect. She wants to break free but feels she has no way out. Will she change her mind before her wedding date approaches? Music mogul Savior Morrison ...

On December 24, 1992, six-year-old Lauren Rudolph was hospitalized with excruciating stomach pain. Less than a week later she was dead. Doctors were baffled: How could a healthy child become so sick so quickly? After a frenzied investigation, public-health officials announced that the cause was E. coli O157:H7, and the source was hamburger meat served at a Jack in the Box restaurant. During this unprecedented crisis, four children died and over seven hundred others became gravely ill.