Download or read book The Money Men Capitalism Democracy and the Hundred Years War Over the American Dollar Enterprise written by H. W. Brands and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An "insightful" (Publishers Weekly) history of the development of American capitalism and the men who made it great. Most Americans are familiar with the political history of the United States, but there is another history woven all through it, a largely forgotten history—the story of the money men. Acclaimed historian H. W. Brands brings them back to life: J. P. Morgan, who stabilized a foundering U.S. Treasury in 1907; Alexander Hamilton, who founded the first national bank, and Nicholas Biddle, under whose directorship it failed; Jay Cooke, who helped to finance the Union war effort through his then-innovative strategy of selling bonds to ordinary Americans; and Jay Gould, who tried to corner the market on gold in 1869 and as a result brought about Black Friday and fled for his life.
Download or read book Masters of Enterprise written by H. W. Brands and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, in a wittily told and deeply insightful history, is a complete set of portraits of America's greatest generators of wealth. Only such a collective study allows us to appreciate what makes the great entrepreneurs really tick. As H.W. Brands shows, these men and women are driven, they are focused, they deeply identify with the businesses they create, and they possess the charisma necessary to persuade other talented people to join them. They do it partly for the money, but mostly for the thrill of creation.
Download or read book The Associates Four Capitalists Who Created California Enterprise written by Richard Rayner and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-01-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A first-rate look at the little-known story behind the creation of America's first continental railroad…Entertaining and well written." —Publishers Weekly One hundred forty years ago, four shopkeepers in Sacramento, California, rose to become the force behind the American transcontinental railroad, achieving along the way wealth beyond measure. To build influence and maintain power, they lied, bribed, and, when necessary, arranged for obstacles, both human and legal, to disappear. Their names were Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins, and they were known as "The Big Four" or "The Associates." Their drive for money—nothing more, nothing less—was epic. Their legacy is a university, public gardens, museums, mansions, banks, and libraries—and to a large degree, California itself. A captivating chronicle of a crucial period in American urban expansion, The Associates is a true-to-life tale of ruthless ambition, staggering greed, and the making of a nation.
Download or read book Wealth and Democracy written by Kevin Phillips and published by Crown. This book was released on 2003-04-08 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than thirty years, Kevin Phillips' insight into American politics and economics has helped to make history as well as record it. His bestselling books, including The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), have influenced presidential campaigns and changed the way America sees itself. Widely acknowledging Phillips as one of the nation's most perceptive thinkers, reviewers have called him a latter-day Nostradamus and our "modern Thomas Paine." Now, in the first major book of its kind since the 1930s, he turns his attention to the United States' history of great wealth and power, a sweeping cavalcade from the American Revolution to what he calls "the Second Gilded Age" at the turn of the twenty-first century. The Second Gilded Age has been staggering enough in its concentration of wealth to dwarf the original Gilded Age a hundred years earlier. However, the tech crash and then the horrible events of September 11, 2001, pointed out that great riches are as vulnerable as they have ever been. In Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips charts the ongoing American saga of great wealth–how it has been accumulated, its shifting sources, and its ups and downs over more than two centuries. He explores how the rich and politically powerful have frequently worked together to create or perpetuate privilege, often at the expense of the national interest and usually at the expense of the middle and lower classes. With intriguing chapters on history and bold analysis of present-day America, Phillips illuminates the dangerous politics that go with excessive concentration of wealth. Profiling wealthy Americans–from Astor to Carnegie and Rockefeller to contemporary wealth holders–Phillips provides fascinating details about the peculiarly American ways of becoming and staying a multimillionaire. He exposes the subtle corruption spawned by a money culture and financial power, evident in economic philosophy, tax favoritism, and selective bailouts in the name of free enterprise, economic stimulus, and national security. Finally, Wealth and Democracy turns to the history of Britain and other leading world economic powers to examine the symptoms that signaled their declines–speculative finance, mounting international debt, record wealth, income polarization, and disgruntled politics–signs that we recognize in America at the start of the twenty-first century. In a time of national crisis, Phillips worries that the growing parallels suggest the tide may already be turning for us all.
Download or read book First Book in Economics written by Emanuel Polioudakis and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2008-09-16 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Want to know how capitalism works so well yet why we have unemployment, where profits come from, and what the Fed is? This is a popular book on economics and capitalism. It uses only simple words and examples - no charts or formulas. It is pro-market while also admitting problems such as with health care and poverty. Unlike similar books, it explains economic theory, explains ideologies, accepts social classes, sees a role for morality, and sometimes uses biological ideas about human nature. It prepares you to understand modern issues, read further, and take a course.
Download or read book Supercapitalism written by Robert B. Reich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of America's foremost economic and political thinkers comes a vital analysis of our new hypercompetitive and turbo-charged global economy and the effect it is having on American democracy. With his customary wit and insight, Reich shows how widening inequality of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and corporate corruption are merely the logical results of a system in which politicians are more beholden to the influence of business lobbyists than to the voters who elected them. Powerful and thought-provoking, Supercapitalism argues that a clear separation of politics and capitalism will foster an enviroment in which both business and government thrive, by putting capitalism in the service of democracy, and not the other way around.
Download or read book Banking in Oklahoma Before Statehood written by Michael J. Hightower and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively book takes Oklahoma history into the world of Wild West capitalism. It begins with a useful survey of banking from the early days of the American republic until commercial patterns coalesced in the East. It then follows the course of American expansion westward, tracing the evolution of commerce and banking in Oklahoma from their genesis to the eve of statehood in 1907. Banking in Oklahoma before Statehood is not just a story of men sitting behind desks. Author Michael J. Hightower describes the riverboat trade in the Arkansas and Red River valleys and freighting on the Santa Fe Trail. Shortages of both currency and credit posed major impediments to regional commerce until storekeepers solved these problems by moving beyond barter to open ad hoc establishments known as merchant banks. Banking went through a wild adolescence during the territorial period. The era saw robberies and insider shenanigans, rivalries between banks with territorial and national charters, speculation in land and natural resources, and land fraud in the Indian Territory. But as banking matured, the better-capitalized institutions became the nucleus of commercial culture in the Oklahoma and Indian Territories. To tell this story, the author blends documentary historical research in both public and corporate archives with his own interviews and those that WPA field-workers conducted with old-timers during the New Deal. Bankers were never far from the action during the territorial period, and the institutions they built were both cause and effect of Oklahoma’s inclusion in national networks of banking and commerce. The no-holds-barred brand of capitalism that breathed life into the Oklahoma frontier has remained alive and well since the days of the fur traders. As one knowledgable observer said in the 1980s, “You’ve always had the gambling spirit in Oklahoma.”
Download or read book Klan War written by Fergus M. Bordewich and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning history of the first national anti-terrorist campaign waged on American soil—when Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable. To repel the virulent tidal wave of violence, President Ulysses S. Grant waged a two-term battle against both armed Southern enemies of Reconstruction and Northern politicians seduced by visions of postwar conciliation, testing the limits of the federal government in determining the extent of states’ rights. In this book, Bordewich transports us to the front lines, in the hamlets of the former Confederate States and in the marble corridors of Congress, reviving an unsung generation of grassroots Black leaders and key figures such as crusading Missouri senator Carl Schurz, who sacrificed the rights of Black Americans in the name of political “reform,” and the ruthless former slave trader and Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. Klan War is a bold and bracing record of America’s past that reveals the bloody, Reconstruction-era roots of present-day battles to protect the ballot box and stamp out resurgent white supremacist ideologies.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Finance written by Irene Finel-Honigman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-10-16 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of finance is again undergoing crisis and transformation. This book provides a new perspective on finance through the prism of popular and formal culture and examines fascination and repulsion toward money, the role of governments and individuals in financial crises and how the Crisis of 2008, like others since 1720, repeat the same patterns of enthusiasm, greed, culpability, revulsion, reform and recovery. The book explores the political and socio-economic factors which determine fallibility and resilience in financial cultures, periods of crisis, transition and recovery based on cyclical rather than linear progression. Examining the roots of financial capitalism, in Europe and the United States and its corollary development in Asia, Russia and emerging markets proves that cultural and psychosocial reactions to financial success, endeavor and calamity transcend specific periods or events. The book allows the reader to discover parallel and intersecting reactions, controversies and resolutions in the cultural history of financial markets and institutions.
Download or read book Ways and Means written by Roger Lowenstein and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Captivating . . . [Lowenstein] makes what subsequently occurred at Treasury and on Wall Street during the early 1860s seem as enthralling as what transpired on the battlefield or at the White House.” —Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal “Ways and Means, an account of the Union’s financial policies, examines a subject long overshadowed by military narratives . . . Lowenstein is a lucid stylist, able to explain financial matters to readers who lack specialized knowledge.” —Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review From renowned journalist and master storyteller Roger Lowenstein, a revelatory financial investigation into how Lincoln and his administration used the funding of the Civil War as the catalyst to centralize the government and accomplish the most far-reaching reform in the country’s history Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. Even before the Confederacy’s secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money. The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency. But amid unprecedented troubles Lincoln saw opportunity—the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the “more perfect union” that had first drawn him to politics. With Lincoln at the helm, the United States would now govern “for” its people: it would enact laws, establish a currency, raise armies, underwrite transportation and higher education, assist farmers, and impose taxes for them. Lincoln believed this agenda would foster the economic opportunity he had always sought for upwardly striving Americans, and which he would seek in particular for enslaved Black Americans. Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s vanquished rival and his new secretary of the Treasury, waged war on the financial front, levying taxes and marketing bonds while desperately battling to contain wartime inflation. And while the Union and Rebel armies fought increasingly savage battles, the Republican-led Congress enacted a blizzard of legislation that made the government, for the first time, a powerful presence in the lives of ordinary Americans. The impact was revolutionary. The activist 37th Congress legislated for homesteads and a transcontinental railroad and involved the federal government in education, agriculture, and eventually immigration policy. It established a progressive income tax and created the greenback—paper money. While the Union became self-sustaining, the South plunged into financial free fall, having failed to leverage its cotton wealth to finance the war. Founded in a crucible of anticentralism, the Confederacy was trapped in a static (and slave-based) agrarian economy without federal taxing power or other means of government financing, save for its overworked printing presses. This led to an epic collapse. Though Confederate troops continued to hold their own, the North’s financial advantage over the South, where citizens increasingly went hungry, proved decisive; the war was won as much (or more) in the respective treasuries as on the battlefields. Roger Lowenstein reveals the largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into a nation. Through a financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution, led by Lincoln, his cabinet, and a Congress studded with towering statesmen, changed the direction of the country and established a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Download or read book Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations written by Frank Costigliola and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A longtime classic in its first and second editions, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 3rd edition presents substantially revised and new essays on traditional themes such as national security, corporatism, borderlands history, and international relations theory. The book also highlights such innovative conceptual approaches and analytical methods as computational analysis, symbolic borders, modernization and technopolitics, nationalism, non-state actors, domestic politics, exceptionalism, legal history, nation branding, gender, race, political economy, memory, psychology, emotions, and the senses. Each chapter is written by a highly respected scholar in the field, many of whom have risen to prominence since the second edition's publication. This collection is an indispensable volume for teachers and students in foreign relations history, international relations history, and political science. The essays are written in accessible, jargon-free prose, thus also making the book appropriate for general readers seeking an introduction to history and political science.
Download or read book Saving Capitalism written by Robert B. Reich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Aftershock and The Work of Nations, his most important book to date—a myth-shattering breakdown of how the economic system that helped make America so strong is now failing us, and what it will take to fix it. Perhaps no one is better acquainted with the intersection of economics and politics than Robert B. Reich, and now he reveals how power and influence have created a new American oligarchy, a shrinking middle class, and the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity in eighty years. He makes clear how centrally problematic our veneration of the “free market” is, and how it has masked the power of moneyed interests to tilt the market to their benefit. Reich exposes the falsehoods that have been bolstered by the corruption of our democracy by huge corporations and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street: that all workers are paid what they’re “worth,” that a higher minimum wage equals fewer jobs, and that corporations must serve shareholders before employees. He shows that the critical choices ahead are not about the size of government but about who government is for: that we must choose not between a free market and “big” government but between a market organized for broadly based prosperity and one designed to deliver the most gains to the top. Ever the pragmatist, ever the optimist, Reich sees hope for reversing our slide toward inequality and diminished opportunity when we shore up the countervailing power of everyone else. Passionate yet practical, sweeping yet exactingly argued, Saving Capitalism is a revelatory indictment of our economic status quo and an empowering call to civic action.
Download or read book The Thirteen American Arguments written by Howard Fineman and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-04-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Fineman is one of our best-known and most trusted political journalists. Mixing vivid scenes and figures from the campaign trail with forays into four hundred years of American history, Fineman shows that every debate, from our nation’s founding to the present day, is rooted in one of thirteen arguments that–thankfully–defy resolution. It is the very process of never-ending argument, Fineman explains, that defines us, inspires us, and keeps us free. At a time when most public disagreement seems shrill and meaningless, Fineman makes a cogent case for nurturing the real American dialogue. Shouting is not arguing, Fineman notes, but often hot-button topics, media “cross-fires,” and blogs reflect the deepest currents in American life. In an enlightening book that cuts through the din and makes sense of the headlines, Fineman captures the essential issues that have always compelled healthy and heated debate–and must continue to do so in order for us to prosper in the twenty-first century. The Thirteen American Arguments run the gamut, from issues of individual identity to our country’s role in the world, including: • Who is a Person? The Declaration of Independence says “everyone,” but it took a Civil War and the Civil Rights and other movements to make that a reality. Presently, what about human embryos and “unlawful enemy combatants?” • Who is an American? Only a nation of immigrants could argue so much about who should become one. There is currently added urgency when terrorists are at large in the world and twelve million “undocumented” aliens are in the country. • The Role of Faith. No country is more legally secular yet more avowedly prayerful. From Thomas Jefferson to Terri Schiavo, we can never quite decide where God fits in government. • Presidential Power. In a democracy, leadership is all the more difficult — and, paradoxically, all the more essential. From George Washington to George W. Bush, we have always asked: How much power should a president have? • America in the World. Uniquely, we perpetually ask ourselves whether we have a moral obligation to change the world—or, alternatively, whether we must try to change it to survive in it. Whether it’s the environment, international trade, interpreting law, Congress vs. the president, or reformers vs. elites, these are the issues that galvanized the Founding Fathers and should still inspire our leaders, thinkers, and citizens. If we cease to argue about these things, we cease to be. “Argument is strength, not weakness,” says Fineman. “As long as we argue, there is hope, and as long as there is hope, we will argue.”
Download or read book The Handbook of Historical Economics written by Alberto Bisin and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 1004 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Historical Economics guides students and researchers through a quantitative economic history that uses fully up-to-date econometric methods. The book's coverage of statistics applied to the social sciences makes it invaluable to a broad readership. As new sources and applications of data in every economic field are enabling economists to ask and answer new fundamental questions, this book presents an up-to-date reference on the topics at hand. - Provides an historical outline of the two cliometric revolutions, highlighting the similarities and the differences between the two - Surveys the issues and principal results of the "second cliometric revolution" - Explores innovations in formulating hypotheses and statistical testing, relating them to wider trends in data-driven, empirical economics
Download or read book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve written by Peter Conti-Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the history, leadership, and structure of the Federal Reserve Bank The independence of the Federal Reserve is considered a cornerstone of its identity, crucial for keeping monetary policy decisions free of electoral politics. But do we really understand what is meant by "Federal Reserve independence"? Using scores of examples from the Fed's rich history, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve shows that much common wisdom about the nation's central bank is inaccurate. Legal scholar and financial historian Peter Conti-Brown provides an in-depth look at the Fed's place in government, its internal governance structure, and its relationships to such individuals and groups as the president, Congress, economists, and bankers. Exploring how the Fed regulates the global economy and handles its own internal politics, and how the law does—and does not—define the Fed's power, Conti-Brown captures and clarifies the central bank's defining complexities. He examines the foundations of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which established a system of central banks, and the ways that subsequent generations have redefined the organization. Challenging the notion that the Fed Chair controls the organization as an all-powerful technocrat, he explains how institutions and individuals—within and outside of government—shape Fed policy. Conti-Brown demonstrates that the evolving mission of the Fed—including systemic risk regulation, wider bank supervision, and as a guardian against inflation and deflation—requires a reevaluation of the very way the nation's central bank is structured. Investigating how the Fed influences and is influenced by ideologies, personalities, law, and history, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve offers a uniquely clear and timely picture of one of the most important institutions in the United States and the world.
Download or read book Flight of the WASP written by Michael Gross and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen families.Four hundred years. The complex saga of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite in America’s history. For decades, writers from Cleveland Amory to Joseph Alsop to the editors of Politico have proclaimed the diminishment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who for generations were the dominant socio-cultural-political force in America. While the WASP elite has, in the last half century, indeed drifted from American centrality to the periphery, its relevance and impact remain, as Michael Gross reveals in his compelling chronicle. From Colonial America’s founding settlements through the Gilded Age to the present day, Gross traces the complex legacy of American WASPs—their profound accomplishments and egregious failures—through the lives of fifteen influential individuals and their very privileged, sometimes intermarried families. As the Bradford, Randolph, Morris, Biddle, Sanford, Peabody and Whitney clans progress, prosper and periodically stumble, defining aspects in the four-century sweep of American history emerge: our wide, oft-contentious religious diversity; the deep scars of slavery, genocide, and intolerance; the creation and sometime mis-use of astonishing economic and political power; an enduring belief in the future; an instinct to offset inequity with philanthropy; an equal capacity for irresponsible, sometimes wanton, behavior. “American society was supposed to be different,” writes Gross, “but for most of our history we have had a patriciate, an aristocracy, a hereditary oligarchic upper class, who initiated the American national experiment.” In previous acclaimed books such as 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery, Gross has explored elite culture in microcosm; expanding the canvas, Flight of the WASP chronicles it across four centuries and fifteen generations in an ambitious and consequential contribution to American history.
Download or read book Legal Publishing in Antebellum America written by M. H. Hoeflich and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legal Publishing in Antebellum America presents a history of the law book publishing and distribution industry in the United States. Part business history, part legal history, part history of information diffusion, M. H. Hoeflich shows how various developments in printing and bookbinding, the introduction of railroads, and the expansion of mail service contributed to the growth of the industry from an essentially local industry to a national industry. Furthermore, the book ties the spread of a particular approach to law, that is, the 'scientific approach', championed by Northeastern American jurists to the growth of law publishing and law book selling and shows that the two were critically intertwined.
