A panoramic survey of the interactions between American business and public policy, from J.P. Morgan to Lee Iacocca.

Professor Majewski compares Virginia and Pennsylvania to explain how slavery undermined the development of the southern economy. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, residents in each state financed transportation improvements to raise land values and spur commercial growth. However, by the 1830s, Philadelphia capitalists began financing Pennsylvania's railroad network, building integrated systems that reached the Midwest. Virginia's railroads remained a collection of lines without western connections. The lack of a major city that could provide capital and traffic for large-scale...

This volume collects Professor Parker's major writings on American agricultural and industrial history, including some essays not previously published. Taken as a whole, these essays give an account of why and how the United States grew rich in the nineteenth century, as well as a background against which to judge the present position of the economy and its international position. Professor Parker focuses on the nineteenth-century experience of the three regions of the United States--northeast, south and midwest, and shows wherein lay the sources of their wealth and growth into a flourishing...

Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a particular, yet comprehensive, view of the economic history of Western Europe since the Renaissance. The focus is wide and the level of treatment deep. Between 1550 and 1940, Professor Parker contends, the development of European capitalism was, in a sense, all of a piece. He separates the development into three periods and processes - ?Malthusian?, ?Smithian?, and ?Schumpeterian?. Each period was governed by a characteristic dynamic that produced productivity growth, in the presence of other favourable elements, and influenced also the...

The story of the RCA VideoDisc is a rare inside look at a company and the way it conducts the complex process of science-based innovation. The author examines how RCA shaped a sophisticated consumer electronics technology in a research and development effort that spanned fifteen years. We see how the company's history, its structure, its technical capability, and its competition all influenced the choices that were made in moving VideoDisc from laboratory to development group to market, and ultimately to withdrawal from the marketplace. Published in hardcover as RCA and the VideoDisc.

In the political economy of energy, World War II was a significant watershed: it accelerated the transition from dependence on coal to petroleum and natural gas. At the same time, mobilization provided an unprecedented experience in the management of energy markets by a forced partnership of business and government. In this 1985 book, Vietor covers American policy from 1945 to 1980. For readers convinced that big business contrived the energy crisis of the 1970s, this story will be disappointing, but enlightening. For those committed to theories of regulatory capture or public interest reform...

Michael Hogan shows how The Marshall Plan was more than an effort to put American aid behind the economic reconstruction of Europe. American officials hoped to refashion Western Europe into a smaller version of the integrated single-market and mixed capitalist economy that existed in the United States. Professor Hogan's emphasis on integration is part of a major reinterpretation that sees the Marshall Plan as an extension of American domestic and foreign-policy developments stretching back through the interwar period to the Progressive Era. Michael Hogan is Professor of History at Ohio State...

By examining the uneven fate of manufacturing industries during the 1930s, Michael Bernstein presents a powerful new interpretation of the Great Depression. The depth and persistence of the slump, he argues, cannot be explained by cyclical theories alone, but by the conjunction of a crisis in financial markets with a long-run transformation in the kinds of goods and services required by firms and households. By focusing on evidence from specific industries, Professor Bernstein provides a more detailed picture of what happened to the American economy in the thirties that was so different from...

AT&T's divestiture was the largest corporate reorganization in history and has had international repercussions. It was a major development in American economic policy, and a prominent part of the deregulation movement of the late 1970s. This study reveals the internal decision-making process at AT&T and explains how private and public interests combined to shape corporate and public policy in late 20th-century America. Temin weaves the strands of politics, economics, business, and law into an accessible narrative history that will be of interest to the general reader who wants to know about...

This book exposes the contradictions in America's disability policy and suggests means of remedying them.