In the 1890s the Apollo Iron and Steel Company ended a bitterly contested labor dispute by hiring replacement workers from the surrounding countryside. To avoid future unrest, however, the company sought to gain tighter control over its workers not only at the factory but also in their homes. Drawing upon a philosophy of reform movements in Europe and the United States, the firm decided that providing workers with good housing and a good urban environment would make them more loyal and pro...

This collection takes on the call issued by reviewers of The American Way for a critical application of Carville Earle's framework to more geographical examples of political and economic shifts in America's past. The essays illustrate changes in U.S. settlement, development, and political structure through the lens of the restructuring of the American economy and society over approximately fifty year cycles of crisis and recovery. They demonstrate the extension of American's spher...

About the BookTo the children of Haleyville, Mrs. Piper-Smith is as close to Mrs. Claus as any human can be. A craftswoman of unmatched skill, people come from all over to adopt one of her beautiful and unique Christmas angel tree toppers year-round. When a special little girl named Emily Jones walks into her shop one winter day, the two form a special bond over the tiniest Christmas angel, Anna, and learn a thing or two about what it means to be an angel themselves.About th...

How did neighborhood groceries, parish halls, factories, and even saloons contribute more to urban vitality than did the fiscal might of postwar urban renewal? With a novelist’s eye for telling detail, Douglas Rae depicts the features that contributed most to city life in the early urbanist” decades of the twentieth century. Rae’s subject is New Haven, Connecticut, but the lessons he draws apply to many American cities.City: Urbanism and Its End beginswith a richly textur...

In The Environment and the People in American Cities, Dorceta E. Taylor provides an in-depth examination of the development of urban environments, and urban environmentalism, in the United States. Taylor focuses on the evolution of the city, the emergence of elite reformers, the framing of environmental problems, and the perceptions of and responses to breakdowns in social order, from the seventeenth century through the twentieth. She demonstrates how social inequalities repeatedl...

"Makes a reader feel like a time traveler plopped down among men who were by turns vicious and visionary."—The Christian Science MonitorThe modern American economy was the creation of four men: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. They were the giants of the Gilded Age, a moment of riotous growth that established America as the richest, most inventive, and most productive country on the planet.A...

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 "mode...

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe

“Read this book. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates“A deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.”—The Atlantic“Extraordinary…Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that’s often ignored: the way African Americans were locked out of the financial engines that create ...

This first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American su...

Walter E. Williams applies an economic analysis to the problems black Americans have faced in the past and still face in the present to show that that free-market resource allocation, as opposed to political allocation, is in the best interests of minorities. He debunks many common labor market myths and reveals how excessive government regulation and the minimum-wage law have imposed incalculable harm on the most disadvantaged members of our society.

Explore the riveting history of the 200-year-old conflict between the planter elite and African Americans of the Mississippi River Delta.“A stunning and fresh analysis of the political economy of white supremacy and the redemptive power of the blues.” —Darlene Clark Hine, co-author of The African American OdysseyDevelopment Arrested is a major reinterpretation of centuries-old conflict between African American workers and ...