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An Economic History of the United States
Broadside Books
April 2012
On Sale: April 17, 2012
586 pages ISBN: 0061834807 EAN: 9780061834806 Kindle: B005HFI0X2 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
From one of America’s leading intellectuals comes a sweeping
and original work of economic history, recounting the epic
story of America’s rise to become the world’s dominant
economy. In Land of Promise, bestselling author
Michael Lind provides a groundbreaking account of how a weak
collection of former British colonies became an industrial,
financial, and military colossus. From the eighteenth to the
twenty-first centuries, the American economy has been
transformed by wave after wave of emerging technology: the
steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine,
computer technology. Yet technology-driven change leads to
growing misalignment between an innovative economy and
anachronistic legal and political structures until the gap
is closed by the modernization of America's
institutions—often amid upheavals such as the Civil War and
Reconstruction and the Great Depression and World War
II. Against the dramatic backdrop of shattering tides
of change, Land of Promise portrays the struggles and
achievements of inventors like Thomas Edison and Samuel
Morse; entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller,
Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs; financiers like
J. P. Morgan; visionary political leaders like Henry Clay
and Franklin Roosevelt; and dynamic policy makers like
Alexander Hamilton and Vannevar Bush. Larger-than-life
figures such as these share the stage with the ordinary
Americans who built a superpower, from midwestern farmers,
southern slaves, and the immigrants who created canals and
railroads to the sisters of Rosie the Riveter, whose labor
in factories during World War II helped to end Hitler's
dream of world domination. When the U.S. economy has
flourished, Lind argues, government and business, labor and
universities, have worked together as partners in a
never-ending project of economic nation building. As the
United States struggles to emerge from the Great Recession,
Land of Promise demonstrates that Americans, since
the earliest days of the republic, have reinvented the
American economy—and have the power to do so again.
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