Borrow: The American Way of Debt


Louis Hyman - 2012
     Borrow examines how the rise of consumer borrowing—virtually unknown before the twentieth century—has altered our culture and economy. Starting in the years before the Great Depression, increased access to money raised living standards but also introduced unforeseen risks. As lending grew more and more profitable, it displaced funds available for business borrowing, setting our economy on an unsustainable course. Told through the vivid stories of individuals and institutions affected by these changes, Borrow charts the collision of commerce and culture in twentieth-century America, giving an historical perspective on what is new—and what is not—in today’s economic turmoil.A Paperback Original

Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy


Stephen S. Cohen - 2015
    Instead, Steve Cohen and Brad DeLong remedy our national amnesia about how our economy has actually grown and the role government has played in redesigning and reinvigorating it throughout our history. The government not only sets the ground rules for entrepreneurial activity but directs the surges of energy that mark a vibrant economy. This is as true for present-day Silicon Valley as it was for New England manufacturing at the dawn of the nineteenth century.The authors' argument is not one based on abstract ideas, arcane discoveries, or complex correlations. Instead it is based on the facts--facts that were once well known but that have been obscured in a fog of ideology--of how the US economy benefited from a pragmatic government approach to succeed so brilliantly.Understanding how our economy has grown in the past provides a blueprint for how we might again redesign and reinvigorate it today, for such a redesign is sorely needed.

House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties


Craig Unger - 2004
     House of Bush, House of Saud begins with a politically explosive question: How is it that two days after 9/11, when U.S. air traffic was tightly restricted, 140 Saudis, many immediate kin to Osama Bin Laden, were permitted to leave the country without being questioned by U.S. intelligence? The answer lies in a hidden relationship that began in the 1970s, when the oil-rich House of Saud began courting American politicians in a bid for military protection, influence, and investment opportunity. With the Bush family, the Saudis hit a gusher -- direct access to presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. To trace the amazing weave of Saud- Bush connections, Unger interviewed three former directors of the CIA, top Saudi and Israeli intelligence officials, and more than one hundred other sources. His access to major players is unparalleled and often exclusive -- including executives at the Carlyle Group, the giant investment firm where the House of Bush and the House of Saud each has a major stake. Like Bob Woodward's The Veil, Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud features unprecedented reportage; like Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? Unger's book offers a political counter-narrative to official explanations; this deeply sourced account has already been cited by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer, and sets 9/11, the two Gulf Wars, and the ongoing Middle East crisis in a new context: What really happened when America's most powerful political family became seduced by its Saudi counterparts?

The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit


Thomas J. Sugrue - 1996
    In this reappraisal of America's dilemma of racial and economic inequality, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty.

God, War, and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England


James A. Warren - 2018
    Yet his orthodox brethren were convinced tolerance fostered anarchy and courted God’s wrath. Banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and laid the foundations for the colony of Rhode Island as a place where Indian and English cultures could flourish side by side, in peace.As the seventeenth century wore on, a steadily deepening antagonism developed between an expansionist, aggressive Puritan culture and an increasingly vulnerable, politically divided Indian population. Indian tribes that had been at the center of the New England communities found themselves shunted off to the margins of the region. By the 1660s, all the major Indian peoples in southern New England had come to accept English authority, either tacitly or explicitly. All, except one: the Narragansetts.In God, War, and Providence “James A. Warren transforms what could have been merely a Pilgrim version of cowboys and Indians into a sharp study of cultural contrast…a well-researched cameo of early America” (The Wall Street Journal). He explores the remarkable and little-known story of the alliance between Roger Williams’s Rhode Island and the Narragansett Indians, and how they joined forces to retain their autonomy and their distinctive ways of life against Puritan encroachment. Deeply researched, “Warren’s well-written monograph contains a great deal of insight into the tactics of war on the frontier” (Library Journal) and serves as a telling precedent for white-Native American encounters along the North American frontier for the next 250 years.

The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War


Alan Brinkley - 1995
    Those origins, says Alan Brinkley, are paradoxically situated during the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal had made liberalism a fixture of American politics and society. The End of Reform shows how the liberalism of the early New Deal--which set out to repair and, if necessary, restructure America's economy--gave way to its contemporary counterpart, which is less hostile to corporate capitalism and more solicitous of individual rights. Clearly and dramatically, Brinkley identifies the personalities and events responsible for this transformation while pointing to the broader trends in American society that made the politics of reform increasingly popular. It is both a major reinterpretation of the New Deal and a crucial map of the road to today's political landscape.

Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class


Jefferson R. Cowie - 2010
    Jefferson Cowie’s edgy and incisive book—part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American musical, film, and TV lore—makes new sense of the 1970s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from New Deal America (with its large, optimistic middle class) to the widening economic inequalities, poverty, and dampened expectations of the 1980s and into the present.Stayin’ Alive takes us from the factory floors of Ohio, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, to the Washington of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Cowie also connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the 1960s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan. Cowie makes unexpected connections between the secrets of the Nixon White House and the failings of George McGovern campaign; radicalism and the blue-collar backlash; the earthy twang of Merle Haggard’s country music and the falsetto highs of Saturday Night Fever. Like Jeff Perlstein’s acclaimed Nixonland, Stayin’ Alive moves beyond conventional understandings of the period and brilliantly plumbs it for insights into our current way of life.

Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower


Michael Beckley - 2018
    Now many analysts believe that other countries are rising and the United States is in decline. Is the unipolar moment over? Is America finished as a superpower?In this book, Michael Beckley argues that the United States has unique advantages over other nations that, if used wisely, will allow it to remain the world’s sole superpower throughout this century. We are not living in a transitional, post-Cold War era. Instead, we are in the midst of what he calls the unipolar era—a period as singular and important as any epoch in modern history. This era, Beckley contends, will endure because the US has a much larger economic and military lead over its closest rival, China, than most people think and the best prospects of any nation to amass wealth and power in the decades ahead.Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, this book covers hundreds of years of great power politics and develops new methods for measuring power and predicting the rise and fall of nations. By documenting long-term trends in the global balance of power and explaining their implications for world politics, the book provides guidance for policymakers, businesspeople, and scholars alike.

City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860


Christine Stansell - 1986
    Female class relations, ``ladies'' and working women, were symbiotic. The laborers had their sexual and social demeanor regulated by their middle-class sisters, who had the leisure to act as ``self-appointed exemplars of virtue.'' The women of the working class come to life in Stansell's identification of their lot. Adrift from family ties, they entered the labor force, many resorting to prostitution and crime, which provoked the philanthropy of genteel bourgeois women, social reformers and the rise of the settlement house movement. The neighborhoods of the poor, the tenements and bawdy houses of 19th century New York are portrayed as important elements in women's history. Stansell teaches at Princeton University.

Uncomplicate Business: All It Takes Is People, Time, and Money


Howard Farran - 2015
    Howard Farran shows that running a business isn’t all that complicated—if, you’re focusing on the right three areas: •People: maximizing the potential of employees, customers, and yourself.•Time: mastering the efficiency that helps a business turn the biggest profit possible.•Money: learning to love the numbers that function as the business’s scorecard.With simplicity, good humor, and plenty of stories Dr. Farran reveals the actions that can lead anyone to bigger profits, happier people, and a more fulfilling life.

The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916


Gabriel Kolko - 1977
    A radically new interpretation of the Progressive Era which argues that business leaders, and not the reformers, inspired the era’s legislation regarding business.

The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century


Gerald Horne - 2020
    Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations and compelled their captors to flee.The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed. Here, Gerald Horne argues forcefully that, in order to understand the arrival of colonists from the British Isles in the early 17th century, one must first understand the “long 16th century”—from 1492 until the arrival of settlers in Virginia in 1607.During this prolonged century, Horne contends, “whiteness” morphed into “white supremacy.” That allowed England to co-opt not only religious minorities but also various nationalities throughout Europe, forging a muscular bloc that was needed to confront rambunctious Indigenes and Africans.In retelling the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas, Horne recounts how the fierce resistance by Africans and their Indigenous allies weakened Spain and enabled London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607. These settlers laid the groundwork for the British Empire and its "revolting spawn" that became the United States of America.

Modern Auditing: Assurance Services and the Integrity of Financial Reporting


William C. Boynton - 1995
    Auditing is perhaps our single best defense in ensuring the integrity of our financial reporting system. That's why this new Eighth Edition of Boynton and Johnson's Modern Auditing focuses on decision making and the critical role auditors play in providing assurance about the integrity of the financial reporting system. Known for its clear writing and accessibility, this text provides comprehensive and integrated coverage of current developments in the environment, standards, and methodology of auditing. Features * Real-world examples relate issues discussed in the chapter to ethics, audit decision making, and the integrity of the financial reporting system. * Focus on Audit Decisions sections highlight key factors that influence an auditor's decisions. * Includes discussion of the role of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) Auditing Standards, and a chapter feature highlights PCAOB standards that differ from Generally Accepted Auditing Standards for private companies. * Expanded case material related to the integrated audit case (Mt. Hood Furniture) provides a variety of databases that allow students to utilize generalized audit software (IDEA) to accomplish various audit tasks. Multiple databases allow the case to be reused with different data from term to term. * A flowchart style chapter preview begins each chapter. * Chapter summaries reinforce important audit decisions included in the chapter. * End-of-chapter material organized by audit decisions provides a clear link between audit decisions discussed in each chapter and the problem material.

Truman Fires MacArthur: (ebook excerpt of Truman)


David McCullough - 2010
    An unpopular war. A military and diplomatic team in disarray. Those are the challenges President Obama has faced as he attempts to make a success of U.S involvement in Afghanistan. They are also the challenges President Truman surmounted in the winter of 1950 as he began managing a war in Korea that risked becoming bigger and more costly. It was the first significant armed conflict of the Cold War: United States troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur came to the aid of the South Koreans after North Korea invaded. When Communist China entered the conflict on the side of the North Koreans, the crisis seemed on the verge of flaring into a world war. Truman was determined not to let that happen. MacArthur kept urging a widening of the war into China itself and ignoring his Commander in Chief. On April 11, 1951, after MacArthur had “shot his mouth off,” as one diplomat put it, one too many times, Truman fired him. The story of their showdown—one of the most dramatic in U.S. history between a Commander in Chief and his top soldier in the field—is captured in all its detail by David McCullough in his biography Truman, and presented here in a e-book called Truman Fires MacArthur (an excerpt of Truman, McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography), which was the headline carried in many newspapers around the country the next day. Truman Fires MacArthur will continue to ride the headlines. It will go on sale as an ebook just as the Rolling Stone profile that exposed General Stanley McChrystal’s insurrection and forced his resignation hits newsstands, and media coverage of the showdown continues to draw historical analogies between Truman and Obama.

When Money Destroys Nations: How Hyperinflation Ruined Zimbabwe, How Ordinary People Survived, and Warnings for Nations that Print Money


Philip Haslam - 2015
    The warning signs are clear, and the collapse of the Zimbabwean dollar in 2009 after years of rampant money printing is a frightening example of what lies in store for the world's economies if painful, but necessary, reform is not enacted soon. When Money Destroys Nations tells the gripping story of the disintegration of the once-thriving Zimbabwean economy and how ordinary people survived in turbulent circumstances. Analysing this case within a global context, Philip Haslam and Russell Lamberti investigate the causes of hyperinflation and draw ominous parallels between Zimbabwe and the world's developed economies. The looming currency crises and possible hyperinflation in these major economies, particularly the United States, have the potential to turn the current world order upside down. Zimbabwe's lessons must not be ignored. This is the story of When Money Destroys Nations.