United States Economics

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.

In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in US monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance.

This volume explores the variety of business enterprise in the United States and analyzes its presence in the country's economy, its evolution over time, and its meaning in society.

This book is about the partnership of God and Mammon in the New World - about how Americans have made money and lost money, and about how they have thought about that obsessive and peculiarly American subject. Money is the basic American thing, the life's blood of the country. God and Mammon shows how the dynamics of money in its many dimensions (material, spiritual, cultural, psychological) worked to make America what it is. It traces the grand American binaries of success and failure to their theological origins in Calvinism's anxieties about salvation and damnation.

Examinando retórica, normas políticas, literatura popular y las teorías científicas a lo largo de 400 años, Nacny Isenberg rechaza las suposiciones sobre la sociedad libre de clases de Estados Unidos, donde la libertad y el trabajo duro te garantizan una verdadera movilidad social. Los blancos pobres miserables y sin tierra han existido desde la época del primer asentamiento colonial británico hasta los actuales "hillbillies".

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE WINNER OF THE 2025 ZÓCALO BOOK PRIZE A humanitarian leader with more than two decades of experience working for the United Nations takes aim at the global food crisis—revealing how hunger anywhere affects lives everywhere and what steps we...

The Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region became the "arsenal of democracy" - the greatest manufacturing center in the world-in the years during and after World War II, thanks to natural advantages and a welcoming culture. Decades of unprecedented prosperity followed, memorably punctuated by riots, strikes, burning rivers, and oil embargoes. A vibrant, quintessentially American character bloomed in the region's cities, suburbs, and backwaters.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

In this gripping political history, New York Times bestselling author Newt Gingrich takes readers behind the scenes of the 1994 Republican Revolution and the rise of the modern GOP to show how we can lead America toward a more conservative, prosperous future. The story of Gingrich’s...

An evocative portrait of a divided America at the dawn of the Cold War Halfway through the twentieth century, the United States towered over the world in industrial might. After winning the 1948 election, Harry Truman hoped to use this economic strength to build on FDR’s achievements...

A “fascinating slice of rarely considered American history” (Booklist)—the story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison—whose annual summer sojourns introduced the road trip to our culture and made the automobile an essential part of modern life. In 1914 Henry Ford and naturalist John Burroughs...

In Economic Conservative/Social Liberal, Bragg offers a plan for fixing the dire problems our country currently faces. Written to engage, educate, and inspire further discussion, the book is intended for any listener interested in gaining greater political and economic understanding for challenging the status quo. Although it is bound to boil the blood of the left and the right, it will make perfect sense to many of the independent voters who will decide the next election.

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

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

Unquestionably, Spain and Great Britain would have been engaged in an unequal controversy for possession of the richest portion of North America, but for the intervention of a new claimant. The young Republic....

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.

Great Eagle Wood is an animal republic where eagles provide leadership, ducks the entrepreneurial guile, and beavers the backbone to make things happen. Growth in the wood sees the evolution of a banking system, a stock market, and a wood wide web. But when their habitat comes under attack, the wood's very existence is threatened, and the animals are forced to take desperate measures to ensure their survival.

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.

In the 30 years after the Civil War, the United States blew by Great Britain to become the greatest economic power in world history. That is a well-known period in history, when titans like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan walked the earth. But as Charles R. Morris shows us, the platform for that spectacular growth spurt was built in the first half of the century. By the 1820s, America was already the world's most productive manufacturer and the most intensely commercialized society in history.

Five hundred feet underground, Jeanne Marie Laskas asked a coal miner named Smitty, “Do you think it’s weird that people know so little about you?” He replied, “I don’t think people know too much about the way the whole damn country works.” Hidden America intends to fix that. Like...