American Industry

The United States spends an excess $1.5 trillion annually on health care compared to other wealthy countries—yet the amount of time that Americans live in good health ranks a lowly 68th in the world. At the heart of the problem is Big Pharma, which funds most clinical trials and therefore controls the research agenda, withholds the real data from those trials as corporate secrets, and shapes most of the information relied upon by health care professionals.

The Ford name is everywhere, even in places where you don’t see it. It is ingrained in the American way of life. From the way we make our food to the way we think about cars, it all came from the mind of this Irishman from Michigan. Henry Ford was a titan’s titan. In monetary terms, he was richer than the richest man alive today. Yet, he was the gentlest of souls and had the brightest of minds. This book covers his life from when his family immigrated to Michigan until his last breath.

The song ‘Joe Hill’, as sung by Joan Baez, Paul Robeson and many more, has become a rallying-call for left-wingers all over the world. Simon Webb’s new book takes a look at the man who inspired the song, an American union activist and ‘true-blue rebel’ who was killed by a firing-squad in Utah in 1915.

The sometimes fragmentary tales of these people, their lives and deaths, are not included in official histories of a place. How, Ensign asks, has a large, socially progressive city like Seattle responded to the health needs of people marginalized by poverty, mental illness, addiction, racial/ethnic/sexual identities, and homelessness? Drawing on interviews and extensive research, Ensign shares a diversity of voices within contemporary health care and public policy debates.

Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In The People’s Hospital, physician Ricardo Nuila’s stunning debut, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care.

In the fall of 1876, two Swiss spies came to America and conducted some of the most covert and consequential industrial espionage in history, changing the course of the global watch industry forever. Had the events of 1876 never happened, we would likely know little of Swiss watches today.

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation.

For decades, researchers have chased a pharmaceutical cure for memory loss. But despite the fact that no disease-modifying biotech treatments have emerged, new research suggests that dementia rates have actually declined in the United States and Western Europe over the last decade. Why is this happening? And what does it mean for brain health in the future?

In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies". Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.

We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems.

By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes listeners into the world of the American medical industry in a way no audiobook has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed.

J. P. Morgan is more than just the name on one of the largest banks in America. He was a man who altered the course of American finance and the chief financier for the strategic interests of the titans of the day, such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. He also financed new and ingenious technologies developed by Thomas Edison and was a visionary who saw the potential in Nikola Tesla. Hear all about him and find areas that you may have in common with this towering titan.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America's shores remade our own country a century ago.

1947 – The UN declares that the British Mandate over Palestine will come to an end. In May 1948 Israel and Arab Palestine will be divided into two independent states. The Arab world reacts immediately: There will be no Jewish state; it will be driven into the sea! Sixty-five million Arabs against six hundred thousand Israeli Jews. Britain has washed its hands of the problem. The United States, under the guise of the Neutrality Act, makes it a felony for any American to supply either side with any arms. Americans Al Schwimmer, Hank Greenspun, and Charlie Winters boldly defy the Neutrality ...

The author of Baldwin's Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit - a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores the city's past, present, and future and its significance to the African American legacy and the nation's fabric.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a special adviser to the White House on health-care reform, has written a brilliant diagnostic explanation of why health care in America has become such a divisive social issue, how money and medicine have their own American story, and why reform has bedeviled presidents of the left and right for more than one hundred years.

With dizzying social transformations in everything from gender to social justice, it may seem like there's never been a more tumultuous period in history. But a single year in the late 18th century saw a number of influential transformations—or even revolutions—that changed the social trajectory of the Western world. By understanding how those events influenced today's cultural landscape, Christians can more effectively bear witness to God's truth in a post-Christian age.

We Band of Angelsis the story of women searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of war. On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck American bases in the Far East, chief among them the Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest defeat and surrender of American forces.