Part of a series of detailed reference manuals on American economic history, this volume traces the development and growth of the factory system, labour movements and foreign and domestic commerce.

The Metaphysical Club is the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History. A national bestseller and "hugely ambitious, unmistakably brilliant" (Janet Maslin, New York Times) book about the creation of modern American thought. The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea -- an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things "out there" waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent -- like knives and forks and microchips -- to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent-- like germs -- on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea deps not on its immutability but on its adaptability. The Metaphysical Club is written in the spirit of this idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a story about America. It begins with the Civil War and s in 1919 with Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion in the case of U.S. v. Abrams-the basis for the constitutional law of free speech. The first four sections of the book focus on Holmes, James, Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. The last section discusses some of the fundamental twentieth-century ideas they are associated with. This is a book about a way of thinking that changed American life.

First Published in 1994. This comprehensive work views U.S. history through the analytical framework of the capitalist process. The highlights of the book are: it weaves together economic history with the history of economic ideas to give a new perspective on the contemporary connections between the economic and social processes; provides an analytical and historical explanation of capitalism as a socioeconomic system; discusses the past and present functioning of the business system, as 'a system of power', with emphasis on the 1970s, 1980s and the stagnation of the 1990s; analyses the relationship between structures of income, wealth and power and class, color and gender; and critically looks at the development and nature of the capitalist state.

Otiginally published in 1975. At the time that Louis Galambos published The Public Image of Big Business in America in 1975, America had matured into a bureaucratic state. The expression of the military-industrial complex and big business grew so pervasive that the postwar United States was defined in large part by its citizens' participation in large-scale organizational structures. Noticing this development, Galambos maintains that the "single most significant phenomenon in modern American history is the emergence of giant, complex organizations." Today, bureaucratic organizations influence the day-to-day lives of most Americans—they gather taxes, regulate businesses, provide services, administer welfare, provide education, and on and on. These organizations are defined by their hierarchical structure in which the power of decision-making is allotted according to abstract rules that create impersonal scenarios. Bureaucracies have developed as a result of technological changes in the second half of the nineteenth century. Based on the premise that these structures had a stronger influence on modern America than any other single phenomenon, this book explores the public's response to the growth of the power and influence of bureaucracy from the years 1880 through 1930. What results is an examination of the social perception of bureaucracy and the development of bureaucratic culture.

Presenting a trenchant critique of America's political culture and its China policy, Radha Sinha explains the reasons for the mismatch between professed American values and the practice of statecraft by the American power elite. He examines the ways in which their relentless search for enemies has led the United States to violate the norms of international law at will, thus causing increasing disenchantment sometimes bordering on hatred.

This book combines the tools of political science, sociology, and labor history to offer a wide-ranging analysis of how unions have participated in politics in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Rather than focus exclusively on national union federations, Gary Marks investigates variations among individual unions both within and across these countries. By examining the individual unions that make up union movements, he probes beyond national descriptions of British laborism, German socialism, and American business unionism while bringing the analysis closer to the actual experiences of people who joined labor organizations. Among the topics Marks examines are state repression of unions, the Organizational Revolution, the contrasting experiences of printing and coalmining unions, and American Exceptionalism. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.