Economic History United States

What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? draws on the voices of individual working people to tell the stories left out of standard histories of that era, and helps us imagine how to address our own failed economy, and how to imagine and build movements challenging it that do not themselves replicate racism and patriarchy.

The story of the Boston Massacre - when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death - is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

Crack explains why, in a de-industrializing America in which market forces ruled and entrepreneurial risk-taking was celebrated, the crack industry was a lucrative enterprise for the "Horatio Alger boys" of their place and time. These young, predominately African American entrepreneurs were profit-sharing partners in a deviant, criminal form of economic globalization. Hip Hop artists often celebrated their exploits but overwhelmingly, Americans - across racial lines - did not. Crack takes a hard look at the dark side of late 20th-century capitalism.

The hidden history of Wall Street and the White House comes down to a single American concept: confidence. Both centers of power, New York and Washington, learned how to manufacture it - until August 2007, when that confidence began to crumble. Ron Suskind here tells the story of what happened next, as Wall Street struggled to save itself while a man with little experience and soaring rhetoric emerged from obscurity to usher in "a new era of responsibility".

The history of United States coinage is a story that parallels the rise of America. Starting from a humble beginning in a basement in Philadelphia in the first few years of the country, it grew to a large highly sophisticated system that produces millions of coins per year. Due to a lack of silver, the first silver coins produced by the Mint came from silverware contributed by George and Martha Washington.

The expanded edition includes a new epilogue in four parts, adding an extra hour to the audiobook. Pride, greed, and power have driven men to do the unthinkable - including selling out their nations and unsuspected citizens to the most corrupt and destructive “invisible” global leaders on Earth. But how did this happen on American soil? How did the downfall begin and who were the predators that the “land of the free and home of the brave” fell victim to? And is all hope lost?

Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.

Discover how - and why - Black, Indigenous, and people of color in America experience societal, economic, and infrastructural inequality throughout history covering everything from Columbus’ arrival in 1492 to the War on Drugs to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sir James Michael Goldsmith (February 26, 1933 - July 18, 1997) was a French-British financier, economist, and politician who was a member of the wealthy generational banking Goldsmith family. In 1994 he was elected to represent a French constituency as a Member of the European Parliament. He also founded the short-lived Referendum Party in the United Kingdom, which became an early campaigner for opposition to Britain's membership of the European Union.

Based on 18 months of reporting, Woodward's 17th book The Price of Politics is an intimate, documented examination of how President Obama and the highest profile Republican and Democratic leaders in the United States Congress attempted to restore the American economy and improve the federal government's fiscal condition over three and one half years. The Price of Politics addresses the key issue of the presidential and congressional campaigns: the condition of the American economy.

America is a smuggler nation. Our long history of illicit imports has ranged from West Indies molasses and Dutch gunpowder in the 18th century, to British industrial technologies and African slaves in the 19th century, to French condoms and Canadian booze in the early 20th century, to Mexican workers and Colombian cocaine in the modern era. Contraband capitalism, it turns out, has been an integral part of American capitalism.

Popular progressive radio host and New York Times best-selling author Thom Hartmann reveals how and why attempts to establish affordable universal healthcare in the United States have been thwarted and what we can do to finally make it a reality.

In the 1930s, battered and humbled by the Great Depression, the US financial sector struck a grand bargain with the federal government. Bankers gained a safety net in exchange for certain curbs on their freedom: transparency rules, record-keeping and anti-fraud measures, and fiduciary responsibilities. By the free-market era of the 1980s and 90s, however, Wall Street argued that rules embodied in New Deal-era regulations to protect consumers and ultimately taxpayers were no longer needed - and government agreed.

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery.

At the start of 1932, the nation's worst economic crisis has left one-in-four workers without a job, countless families facing eviction, banks shutting down as desperate depositors withdraw their savings, and growing social and political unrest. Amid this turmoil, a political decision looms that will determine the course of the nation. It's a choice between two men with very different visions of America: Incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover and New York's Democratic Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Unequal Gains offers a radically new understanding of the economic evolution of the United States, providing a complete picture of the uneven progress of America from colonial times to today. While other economic historians base their accounts on American wealth, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson focus instead on income - and the result is a bold reassessment of the American economic experience.

Liberal democracy is in recession and authoritarianism is on the rise. The ties that ought to bind open markets to free and fair elections are being strained and spurned, even in democracy's notional heartlands. Around the world, powerful voices argue that capitalism is better without democracy; others that democracy is better without capitalism. This book is a forceful rejoinder to both views, offering a deep and lucid assessment of why the marriage between capitalism and democracy has grown so strained and making clear why a divorce would be an almost unthinkable calamity.

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” So said Abraham Lincoln as he contemplated the great issues of containing slavery and preserving the Union. Now, after another era of turbulent political chaos, including repudiation of traditional American values by many elites in politics and academia, we are embarked on a GREAT RESTORATION of respect for our Founding principles. This book is written to show where we are, and whither we are tending, by explaining our current political controversies in context of where...

A dazzlingly original account of the life and thought of Adam Smith, the greatest economist of all time. In Adam Smith, political philosopher Jesse Norman dispels the myths and caricatures, and provides a far more complex portrait of the man. Offering a highly engaging account of Smith's life and times, Norman explores his work as a whole and traces his influence over two centuries to the present day. Finally, he shows how a proper understanding of Smith can help us address the problems of modern capitalism.

As the 20th century began, oil in Texas was easy to find, but the quantities were too small to attract industrial capital and production. Then, on January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher blew in. Over the next 50 years, oil transformed Texas, creating a booming economy that built cities, attracted out-of-state workers and companies, funded schools and universities, and generated wealth that raised the overall standard of living - even for blue-collar workers. No other 20th-century development had a more profound effect upon the state.