Economic History United States

Perhaps the 19th century's best book on Wall Street, Fifty Years in Wall Street provides a fascinating look at the financial markets during a period of rapid economic expansion.

Ben Price reveals that our constitution and legal system were intentionally designed to give more rights to the wealthy propertied class than the rest of us, and exposes how this hamstrings our ability to effectively address a host of pressing social and environmental problems - and what we can do about it. Many of today’s most serious issues - homelessness, gun violence, fracking, prison privatization, predatory lending, and many more - resist resolution because the “rights of property” undermine the rights of people.

This book examines one of the most important economic outcomes in American history - the breakdown of the Keynesian Revolution. Drawing on economic literature, the memoirs of economists and politicians, and the popular press, Eric Crouse examines how economic decline in the 1970s precipitated a political revolution. Keynesian thought flourished through the presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, until stagflation devastated American workers and Jimmy Carter’s economic policies faltered, setting the stage for the 1980 presidential campaign.

Kellogg in the late 1940s and 50s was a typical American small town complete with high school football and basketball teams, marching band, and anti-Communist clubs; yet its bars, gambling dens, and brothels were entrenched holdovers from a rowdier frontier past. The Bunker Hill Mining Company, the largest employer, paid miners good wages for difficult, dangerous work, while the quest for lead, silver, and zinc denuded the mountainsides and laced the soil and water with contaminants.

There may be no story today with a wider gap between fact and fiction than the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Through portraits of business leaders, migrants, chefs, movie directors, police officers, and media and sports executives, Andrew Selee looks at this emerging Mexico, showing how it increasingly influences our daily lives in the United States in surprising ways - the jobs we do, the goods we consume, and even the new technology and entertainment we enjoy.

More than 50 years ago, an assassin's bullet robbed us of one of the most eloquent voices for 20th-century human rights and justice. Drawing on a new generation of scholarship about the civil rights era, To the Promised Land goes beyond the iconic view of King as an advocate of racial harmony to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class, and his call for "nonviolent resistance" to all forms of oppression, including economic injustice.

El colapso del mercado de valores de 1929 no provocó la Gran Depresión en sí misma, pero fue un poderoso punto de partida simbólico para el mayor desastre económico del siglo XX. En ese oscuro día de octubre de 1929, se perdieron fortunas y el temor a la inseguridad financiera aumentó en todo Estados Unidos y el mundo. En 1932, el punto más bajo de la Depresión, un tercio de los estadounidenses no tenían trabajo e incluso había más gente desempleada que en otros países.

Mark Twain's lifetime spans America's era of greatest economic growth. And Twain was an active, even giddy, participant in all the great booms and busts of his time, launching himself into one harebrained get-rich-quick scheme after another. But far from striking it rich, the man who coined the term "Gilded Age" failed with comical regularity to join the ranks of plutocrats who made this period in America notorious for its wealth and excess.

This enthralling book is the first to uncover the story of New York City merchants who engaged in forbidden trade with the enemy before and during the Seven Years’ War. Ignoring British prohibitions designed to end North America’s wartime trade with the French, New York’s merchant elite conducted a thriving business in the French West Indies, insisting that their behavior was protected by long practice and British commercial law. But the government in London viewed it as treachery, and its subsequent efforts to discipline North American commerce inflamed the colonists.

What You Need To Know About The TRUMP Tariffs NOW - Protect Yourself and Capitalize on the Dramatic Changes Ahead! Unlock the INSIDER'S guide to the Trump Tariffs and gain an unfair advantage! Sruggling to understand the sweeping implications of the 2025 Trump Tariffs? Cut through the noise and get straight to the essential facts in "What You Need To Know About The TRUMP Tariffs NOW" by Paul David Franklin. This isn't just another dry economic treatise; it's your action-oriented guide to navigating the seismic shifts in global trade and the US economy. In addition to the historical facts of...

We Sell Drugs is a study grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca-leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States. More than a narrow biography of one famous plant and its equally famous derivative products - Coca-Cola and cocaine - this audiobook situates these commodities within the larger landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Suzanna Reiss provides a geographic and legal basis for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality.

The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Drug control is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society's habits and daily lives. In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, hegemony, and racial equality, We Sell Drugs insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a major weapon in asserting control of domestic and international affairs.

America’s self-invented tinkerers are back at it in their metaphorical garages - fiddling with everything from solar-powered cars to space elevators. In Bunch of Amateurs, Jack Hitt visits a number of different garages and has written a fascinating book that looks at America’s current batch of amateurs and their pursuits. Beginning with Ben Franklin’s kite and leading all the way to the current TV hit American Idol, Hitt argues that the nation’s love of self-invented obsessives has always driven the country to rediscover the true heart of the American dream.

This in-depth look at the Great Depression will give you a full understanding of the economic, cultural and social effects of the Great Depression that continue to shape our society even today. Through this book, you will gain an understanding of the reasons why the Great Depression occurred, the various efforts taken to address the crisis, and the lasting effects of the crisis on the United States economy.

Many hands have built our great nation, and many of them have come far from home to do it. I'd like you to please discover more about how migration has helped shape modern America. America’s history is rich with the stories of brave people with big dreams who have come here searching for opportunities—and in doing so, they’ve helped to shape both our economy and our culture. What drove these people? What challenges did they face along the way? There’s so much more to American history than the history books have told you.

Some 70 years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-16th century, England was a small and relatively insignificant kingdom on the periphery of Europe. Struggling with a single export - woolen cloth - the merchants were forced to seek new markets and trading partners. As this absorbing account shows, innovation and risk-taking were at the heart of the settlement of America, as was the profit motive.

Taxing the Rich draws on unparalleled evidence from 20 countries over the last two centuries to provide the broadest and most in-depth history of progressive taxation available. Scheve and Stasavage explore the intellectual and political debates surrounding the taxation of the wealthy while also providing the most detailed examination to date of when taxes have been levied against the rich and when they haven't.

The writing of history is always in terms of a framework, a philosophical and ultimately religious conceptual structure in the mind of the historian. To the orthodox Christian, the shabby incarnations of the reigning historiographies are both absurd and offensive. A Christian historiography and a Christian revisionism are thus for him moral imperatives. These essays are studies in Christian revisionism. There purpose is to call attention those aspects of American history that are currently neglected.

"America at the Crossroads: Parallels with the Roman Empire’s Fall" explores the economic, military, political, and social factors that contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire, drawing comparisons with modern-day America.

While history teaches that successful revolutions depend on participation by the common man, the establishment of a stable and independent United States first required wealthy colonials uniting to disrupt the very system that had enriched them, and then funding a very long war. While some fortunes were made during the war at the expense of the poor, many of the wealthy embraced the goal of obtaining for their poorer countrymen an unprecedented equality of opportunity, along with independence.

This is a true story of personal greed and downfall, corporate greed fueled with economic and social treachery, shareholder waste and discrimination at AIG, 70 Pine Street in the heart of the financial district. This address is known as the AIG Tower, hence the title Tower of Thieves. The central character is a man with a wife, a family, who has cheated his way to the top by doing good. He is responsible for leading a 60 billion dollar organization with over 40,000 employees worldwide at one of the largest companies in the world. What he sees and what he does validates what unchecked power ...