These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades.Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players—from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousand, and much more. Cattle Kingdom is a revelatory new view of the Old West.

    Increasingly dependent on the efforts of others over our own, Americans are free to freeload. From the corporate bailouts on Wall Street to the alarming increases in personal default and dependency, from questionable tax exemptions to enormous pension, healthcare, and other entitlement costs, the new moocher culture cuts across lines of class, race, and private and public sectors. And the millions that plan and behave sensibly, only to bail out the profligate? They're angry.Charles Sykes' argument is not against compassion or legitimate charity, but targets the new moocher culture, in which self-reliance and personal responsibility have given way to mass grasping after handouts. A Nation of Moochers is a persuasively argued and entertaining rallying cry for Americans who are tired of playing by the rules and paying for those who don't.

    Here, University of Tennessee history professor Freeberg, author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Democracy’s Prisoner, shows how radically the light bulb transformed America, freeing it from the stranglehold of the gas companies, turning it from a rural to an urban society and, as the electrical grid took over, drawing a sharp line between city and country, rich and poor. For history buffs and techies alike.- Library Journal Reviews: http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/201...

    They offer a complete history of the Colonial period ofAmerican history, a period lost to students today, who are led to believeAmerican history begins with the US Constitution. Rothbard's ambition was to shed new light on Colonial history and show that the struggle for human liberty was the heart and soul of this land from its discovery through the culminating event of the American Revolution. These volumes are a tour de force, enough to establish Rothbard as one of the great American historians. Although a detailed narrative history of the struggle between liberty andpower, Rothbard offers a third alternative to the conventional interpretivedevices. Against those on the right who see the American Revolution as a"conservative" event, and those on the left who want to invoke it as somesort of proto-socialist uprising, Rothbard views this period as a time ofaccelerating libertarian radicalism. Through this prism, Rothbardilluminates events as never before. The volumes were brought out in the 1970s, but the odd timing and unevendistribution prevented any kind of large audience. They were beloved only by a few specialists, and sought after by many thanks to their outstandingreputation. The Mises Institute is pleased to be the publisher of the newlyavailable set. Volume One covers the discovery of the Americas and the colonies in the 17th century (531 pages, including index). Volume Two covers the period of "salutary neglect" in the first half of the18th century (294 pages, including index). Volume Three covers the advance to revolution, from 1760-1775 (373 pages, including index). Volume Four covers the political, military, and ideological history of therevolution and after (470 pages, including index). ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) distinguished himself as an economist, writing a major treatise on theory, several important economic histories, and a highly praised history of economic thought. But he was also known as the pioneer thinker of libertarianism, the political philosophy that roots freedom in private property ownership and decries the state as inherently contrary to the ethics of a free society. Writing from this perspective, he gained a reputation as the most provocative and influential contributor to the anarchist tradition in our century.

    But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations--such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution--fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

    "Freaks of Fortune" tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future.Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk s rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one s own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name financial services industry. Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system.Amid the nineteenth-century s waning faith in God s providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. "Freaks of Fortune" is one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.

    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.

    Starting with the leak to the press of Roosevelt's famous Rainbow Plan, then spiraling back to FDR's inept prewar diplomacy with Japan, and his various attempts to lure Japan into an attack on the U.S. Fleet in the Pacific, Fleming takes the reader inside the incredibly fractious struggles and debates that went on in Washington, the nation, and the world as the New Dealers, led by FDR, strove to impose their will on the conduct of the War. Unlike the familiar yet idealized FDR of Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time, the reader encounters a Roosevelt in remorseless decline, battered by ideological forces and primitive hatreds which he could not handle-and frequently failed to understand-some of them leading to unimaginable catastrophe. Among FDR's most dismaying policies, Fleming argues, were an insistence on "unconditional surrender" for Germany (a policy that perhaps prolonged the war by as many as two years, leaving millions more dead) and his often uncritical embrace of and acquiescence to Stalin and the Soviets as an ally. For many Americans, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a beloved, heroic, almost mythic figure, if not for the "big government" that was spawned under his New Deal, then certainly for his leadership through the War. The New Dealers' War paints a very different portrait of this leadership. It is sure to spark debate.

    What we may not realize is that the United States was born out of debt. After the Revolution, the brilliant Alexander Hamilton was less interested in paying down the Revolutionary war debt than in using it to create a vibrant national economy. If it is not excessive, he declared, a national debt will be to us a national blessing.In a fascinating narrative brimming with colorful characters, historical accidents, and American ingenuity, business historian John Steele Gordon leads us on a tour of an American institution whose largely unknown story has been integrally entwined with our country's destiny. At key points in U.S. history, Gordon shows how the national debt has been a potent instrument of fiscal policy in keeping the world safe for democracy.But how much debt is too much? At a time when we despair of balancing even a single year's budget, Hamilton's Blessing provides much needed perspective -- and hope.

    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.

    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.

    In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?”, The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States."Recent months have witnessed an attack of unprecedented passion and ferocity against the national government. The Republican Party has apparently embarked on a crusade to destroy national standards, national projects, and national regulations and to transfer domestic governing authority from the national government to the states. A near majority of the Supreme Court even seems to want to replace the Constitution by the Articles of Confederation…"Unbridled rhetoric is having consequences far beyond anything that antigovernment politicians intend. The flow of angry words seems to have activated and in a sense legitimized what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the 'paranoid strain' in American politics." - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Wall Street Journal, June 7, 1995

    At the war s end, the national government owed tremendous sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens. But lacking the power to tax, it had no means to repay them. "The Founders and Finance" is the first book to tell the story of how foreign-born financial specialists immigrants solved the fiscal crisis and set the United States on a path to long-term economic success.Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas K. McCraw analyzes the skills and worldliness of Alexander Hamilton (from the Danish Virgin Islands), Albert Gallatin (from the Republic of Geneva), and other immigrant founders who guided the nation to prosperity. Their expertise with liquid capital far exceeded that of native-born plantation owners Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, who well understood the management of land and slaves but had only a vague knowledge of financial instruments currencies, stocks, and bonds. The very rootlessness of America s immigrant leaders gave them a better understanding of money, credit, and banks, and the way each could be made to serve the public good.The remarkable financial innovations designed by Hamilton, Gallatin, and other immigrants enabled the United States to control its debts, to pay for the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and barely to fight the War of 1812, which preserved the nation s hard-won independence from Britain."

    For the engineers who had to kill the well, this was like Apollo 13, a crisis no one saw coming, and one of untold danger and challenge. A suspense story, a mystery, a technological thriller: This is Joel Achenbach’s groundbreaking account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and what came after. The tragic explosion on the huge drilling rig in April 2010 killed eleven men and triggered an environmental disaster. As a gusher of crude surged into the Gulf’s waters, BP engineers and government scientists—awkwardly teamed in Houston—raced to devise ways to plug the Macondo well. Achenbach, a veteran reporter for The Washington Post and acclaimed science writer for National Geographic, moves beyond the blame game to tell the gripping story of what it was like, behind the scenes, moment by moment, in the struggle to kill Macondo. Here are the controversies, the miscalculations, the frustrations, and ultimately the technical triumphs of men and women who worked out of sight and around the clock for months to find a way to plug the well. The Deepwater Horizon disaster was an environmental 9/11. The government did not have the means to solve the problem; only the private sector had the tools, and it didn’t have the right ones as the country became haunted by Macondo’s black plume, which was omnipresent on TV and the Internet. Remotely operated vehicles, the spaceships of the deep, had to perform the challenging technical ma-neuvers on the seafloor. Engineers choreographed this robotic ballet and crammed years of innovation into a single summer. As he describes the drama in Houston, Achenbach probes the government investigation into what went wrong in the deep sea. This was a confounding mystery, an engineering whodunit. The lessons of this tragedy can be applied broadly to all complex enterprises and should make us look more closely at the highly engineered society that surrounds us. Achenbach has written a cautionary tale that doubles as a technological thriller.

    Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to shows how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.