United States Economics

In 1980, Exxon U.S.A., the world's largest corporation, began development of a five-billion-dollar oil shale industry in the pristine Colorado River Valley. Within eighteen months, Exxon had canceled its elaborate Colony project and 2,100 workers were immediately laid off. Boomtown Blues chronicles the social, environmental, and economic havoc created by one of the most expensive boom and bust cycles in the history of the American West.

While history teaches that successful revolutions depend on participation by the common man, the establishment of a stable and independent United States first required wealthy colonials uniting to disrupt the very system that had enriched them, and then funding a very long war. While some fortunes were made during the war at the expense of the poor, many of the wealthy embraced the goal of obtaining for their poorer countrymen an unprecedented equality of opportunity, along with independence.

America’s self-invented tinkerers are back at it in their metaphorical garages - fiddling with everything from solar-powered cars to space elevators. In Bunch of Amateurs, Jack Hitt visits a number of different garages and has written a fascinating book that looks at America’s current batch of amateurs and their pursuits. Beginning with Ben Franklin’s kite and leading all the way to the current TV hit American Idol, Hitt argues that the nation’s love of self-invented obsessives has always driven the country to rediscover the true heart of the American dream.

Though best known for his primary authorship of the Federalist Papers, his death in a duel at the hands of Vice President Aaron Burr on the banks of the Hudson River and his star role in a 21st-century musical, it is often overlooked that Alexander Hamilton was instrumental in creating the key financial building blocks of the young United States of America. The first incumbent of the office of secretary of the Treasury on September 11, 1789, Hamilton submitted a series of financial reports many of which became the economic foundations on which the US was built.

The Compassionate Capitalists pulls back the curtain on the forgotten entrepreneurs who built empires without grinding their workers into dust. From Henry Ford doubling wages overnight to Madam C.J. Walker building a beauty empire that empowered thousands of Black women, these industrialists dared to prove that you could run a successful business without being a soulless overlord.

We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions. These are the words of Adolf Hitler. He and the National Socialist German Worker’s Party –the NAZI– were a SOCIALIST Party. Then who told us that Hitler and the NAZI were Fascist? Joseph Stalin, the mass murderer of the USSR, said so. And the rest of ...

This enthralling book is the first to uncover the story of New York City merchants who engaged in forbidden trade with the enemy before and during the Seven Years’ War. Ignoring British prohibitions designed to end North America’s wartime trade with the French, New York’s merchant elite conducted a thriving business in the French West Indies, insisting that their behavior was protected by long practice and British commercial law. But the government in London viewed it as treachery, and its subsequent efforts to discipline North American commerce inflamed the colonists.

Crash tells the story of the Great Depression, from the sweeping fallout of the market collapse to the more personal stories of those caught up in the aftermath. Packed with photographs, primary documents, and firsthand accounts, Crash shines a spotlight on pivotal moments and figures across ethnic, gender, racial, social, and geographic divides, reflecting many different experiences of one of the most turbulent decades in American history.

Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point. Interweaving her own experience, Allen shares surprising stories of hope and ingenuity.

What You Need To Know About The TRUMP Tariffs NOW - Protect Yourself and Capitalize on the Dramatic Changes Ahead! Unlock the INSIDER'S guide to the Trump Tariffs and gain an unfair advantage! Sruggling to understand the sweeping implications of the 2025 Trump Tariffs? Cut through the noise and get straight to the essential facts in "What You Need To Know About The TRUMP Tariffs NOW" by Paul David Franklin. This isn't just another dry economic treatise; it's your action-oriented guide to navigating the seismic shifts in global trade and the US economy. In addition to the historical facts of...

Mark Twain's lifetime spans America's era of greatest economic growth. And Twain was an active, even giddy, participant in all the great booms and busts of his time, launching himself into one harebrained get-rich-quick scheme after another. But far from striking it rich, the man who coined the term "Gilded Age" failed with comical regularity to join the ranks of plutocrats who made this period in America notorious for its wealth and excess.

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.

Whiting, Indiana Saturday, August 27, 1955 Sunrise, 6:11 a.m. Its 80 degrees in the shade, and most of the city's residents are still trying to sleep off an airless, oppressive night. But inside the plant at Whiting's biggest employer (and one of the worlds largest oil refineries), something has gone horribly wrong, something that threatens to destroy the entire community. The clock changes. 6:12 a.m. This is the story of what happened at one minute after sunrise on that cataclysmic day in 1955, spoken in the words of the people who lived through it.

In the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens United decision, it's become commonplace to note the growing political dominance of a small segment of the economic elite. But what exactly are those members of the elite doing with their newfound influence? The One Percent Solution provides an answer to this question for the first time. Gordon Lafer's book is a comprehensive account of legislation promoted by the nation's biggest corporate lobbies across all 50 state legislatures and encompassing a wide range of labor and economic policies.

When Clara arrived in America, she couldn't speak English. She didn't know that young women had to go to work, that they traded an education for long hours of labor, that she was expected to grow up fast. But that didn't stop Clara. She went to night school, spent hours studying English, and helped support her family by sewing in a shirtwaist factory. Clara never quit, and she never accepted that girls should be treated poorly and paid little.

We Sell Drugs is a study grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca-leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States. More than a narrow biography of one famous plant and its equally famous derivative products - Coca-Cola and cocaine - this audiobook situates these commodities within the larger landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Suzanna Reiss provides a geographic and legal basis for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality.

The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Drug control is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society's habits and daily lives. In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, hegemony, and racial equality, We Sell Drugs insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a major weapon in asserting control of domestic and international affairs.

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.

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".

"America at the Crossroads: Parallels with the Roman Empire’s Fall" explores the economic, military, political, and social factors that contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire, drawing comparisons with modern-day America.

Ben Price reveals that our constitution and legal system were intentionally designed to give more rights to the wealthy propertied class than the rest of us, and exposes how this hamstrings our ability to effectively address a host of pressing social and environmental problems - and what we can do about it. Many of today’s most serious issues - homelessness, gun violence, fracking, prison privatization, predatory lending, and many more - resist resolution because the “rights of property” undermine the rights of people.