John Kenneth Galbraith has long been at the center of American economics, in key positions of responsibility during the New Deal, World War II, and since, guiding policy and debate. His trenchant new book distills this lifetime of experience in the public and private sectors; it is a scathing critique of matters as they stand today. Sounding the alarm about the increasing gap between reality and "conventional wisdom" -- a phrase he coined -- Galbraith...

Throughout time, from ancient Rome to modern Britain, the great empires built and maintained their domination through force of arms and political power. But not the United States. America has dominated the world in a new, peaceful, and pervasive way -- through the continued creation of staggering wealth. In this authoritative, engrossing history, John Steele Gordon captures as never before the true source of our nation's global influence: wealth and...

"A stunning inside look at how and why the foundations upon which China has built the world's second largest economy have started to crumble. Over the course of a decade reporting on the ground in China as a financial journalist, Dinny McMahon gradually concluded that the widely held belief in China's inevitable economic ascent is dangerously wrong. In this unprecedented deep dive, McMahon shows how, lurking behind the illusion of prosperity, China's...

Recounts the disorder in Europe after World War II, describing the brutal acts against Germans and collaborators, the anti-Semitic beliefs that reemerged, and the Allied-tolerated expulsions of citizens from their ancestral homelands.

"Ashford, Vermont, might look like your typical sleepy New England college town, but to the shadowy residents who live among the remains of its abandoned mills and factories, it's known as 'Burntown.' Eva Sandeski, known as 'Necco' on the street, has been a part of this underworld for years, ever since the night her father Miles drowned in a flood that left her and her mother Lily homeless. A respected professor, Miles was also an inventor of fantastic...

This famous study - one of the most influential in the area of American economic history - brought a halt to Americans' uncritical reverence for their country's revolutionary past. Questioning the Founding Fathers' motivations in drafting the Constitution, it viewed the results as a product of economic self-interest. Perhaps the most controversial books of its time.

Celebrated economic policy maker and political theorist Robert B. Reich argues that the nation's 2008 economic collapse is the result of an increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top--and a middle class that had to go deeply into debt to maintain a decent standard of living. To ensure that prosperity is widely shared, he continues, requires the implementation of a much broader safety net for the middle class financed by higher marginal...

This classic study of antebellum Southern society demonstrates how slavery was the bedrock of the region's social order and cultural identity. In The Political Economy of Slavery, Eugene Genovese argues that slavery gave the South a distinct class structure, political community, economy, ideology, and a set of psychological patterns. As a result, the South grew away from the rest of the nation and became increasingly unstable during the nineteenth...

THE "march on Rome" of October 28th, 1922, marked the advent to power of the Fascist Party in Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The seizure of the government through a coup d'état was justified by the claim that Italy had to be rescued from the imminent danger of a Bolshevist revolution. Before the eyes of a world horrified by the tragedy of Russia, Italian Fascism assumed the role of the knightly Saint George who had slain the red...

Examines the economic growth of the United States since the Civil War, arguing that the rate of growth between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated and that a number of issues are further stagnating the already slow rate of productivity growth. "In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel,...