American Business History

One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now: What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us...

How does our government eavesdrop? Whom do they eavesdrop on? And is the interception of communication an effective means of predicting and preventing future attacks? These are some of the questions at the heart of Patrick Radden Keefe’s brilliant new book, Chatter. In the late 1990s, when...

Named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and The Times-Picayune The fascinating untold tale of Samuel Zemurray, the self-made banana mogul who went from penniless roadside banana peddler to kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary When Samuel Zemurray arrived in America in 1891...

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken...

struggling with a recession . . . European nations at risk of defaulting on their loans . . . A possible global financial crisis. It happened before, in the 1970s. Oil Kings is the story of how oil came to dominate U.S. domestic and international affairs. As Richard Nixon fought off Watergate...

A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it. In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today...

In this “scrupulously reported biography” (NPR) Jordan documents how Melania Trump had discussing being First Lady nearly two decades before she landed in the White House and how she encouraged her husband to enter the race for president. Based on interviews with more than one hundred people...

For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue”—an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.

REMARKABLE BIOGRAPHY OF AN ICON There's little debate that Robert De Niro is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, screen actors of his generation, perhaps of all time. His work, particularly in the first 20 years of his career, is unparalleled. Mean Streets, the Godfather Part II, Taxi...

From an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter comes a gripping account of one of the most captivating and bizarre tales in the history of the FBI and corporate America. It was one of the FBI's biggest secrets: Mark Whitacre, a senior executive at Archer Daniels Midland--America's...

Listeners of this book will gain a clear understanding of what makes the Japanese, and their society, tick.

From Notre Dame professor and author of Why Liberalism Failed comes a provocative call for replacing the tyranny of the self-serving liberal elite with conservative leaders aligned with the interests of the working class Classical liberalism promised to overthrow the old aristocracy, creating an...

The bestselling author of the acclaimed House of Cards and The Last Tycoons turns his spotlight on to Goldman Sachs and the controversy behind its success. From the outside, Goldman Sachs is a perfect company. The Goldman PR machine loudly declares it to be smarter, more ethical, and more...

The gripping inside story of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy—by a leading tech journalist Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are...

In the wake of the Civil War, African Americans attained freedom from chattel slavery, but continued to suffer discrimination both legal in the form of Jim Crow laws and de facto in the continued perception among the vast majority of white Americans that African Americans were at the very least inferior and at the most a constant dangerous presence in their communities who must be carefully controlled.

During the first hundred years of Chinese immigration--from 1848 to 1943--San Francisco was home to a shockingly extensive underground slave trade in Asian women, who were exploited as prostitutes and indentured servants. In this gripping, necessary book, bestselling author Julia Flynn Siler...

One of New York Magazine's best books on Silicon Valley! The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the...

From a seasoned political journalist, an eye-opening examination of Tucker Carlson’s rise through conservative media and politics, and his ideological transformation over the past thirty years, tracking the concurrent shifts in the political and media landscapes which have both influenced and...

“A must-read for anyone wanting to better understand what has already happened here in America and what lies ahead if Trump is reelected in November…. A magisterial account of the money and violence behind the world’s most powerful dictatorships.” –Washington Post In this shocking...

An accessible, compelling introduction to today’s major policy issues from the New York Times columnist, best-selling author, and Nobel prize–winning economist Paul Krugman. There is no better guide than Paul Krugman to basic economics, the ideas that animate much of our public policy...