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With Risk and Ruin, Gavin Benke places Enron's fall within the larger history of late twentieh-century American capitalism. In many ways, Benke argues, Enron was emblematic of the transitions that characterized the era.
Explore the world of barbecue as food and culture through first-person stories from pit masters, barbecue joint owners, sausage makers, and wood suppliers. It’s no overstatement to say that the state of Texas is a republic of barbecue. Whether it’s brisket, sausage, ribs, or chicken, barbecue feeds friends while they catch up, soothes tensions at political events, fuels community festivals, sustains workers of all classes, celebrates brides and grooms, and even supports churches. Recognizing just how central barbecue is to Texas’s cultural life, Elizabeth Engelhardt and a team of eleven graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin set out to discover and describe what barbe...
This volume describes the many ways presidential actions have affected the development of capitalism in the post–World War II era. Contributors show how, since Harry S. Truman took office in 1945, the American "Consumer-in-Chief " has exerted a decisive hand as well as behind-the-scenes influence on the national economy. And, by extension, on the everyday lives of Americans. The Employment Act of 1946 expanded presidential responsibility to foster prosperity and grow the economy. However, the details and consequences of the president’s budget often remain obscured because of the budget’s size and complexity, perpetuating an illusion that presidents matter less than markets. Essays in t...
A Decade of Dark Humor analyzes ways in which popular and visual culture used humor-in a variety of forms-to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001 and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humor and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality. Furthermore, it demonstrates that laughter is simultaneously an avenue through which social issues are deferred or obfuscated, a way in which neoliberal or neoconservative rhetoric is challenged, and a means of forming alternative political ideologies. The volume's contributors cover a broad range of media productions, including news p...
This volume explores the Industrial Age (1860–1914), bringing together published and archival primary sources with introductory essays that contextualize a period of extraordinary social, cultural, and economic transformation. The Industrial Age’s developments, which included electricity, internal-combustion engines, moving assembly lines, and clock time, posed as much risk and opportunity as do today’s innovations. Today artificial intelligence, terrorism, climate change, and the threat of pandemics like Covid-19 threaten our safety and sense of well-being, just as machine production, the labor movement, toxic chemicals and waste, and epidemics like tuberculosis and cholera posed sign...
Although most Americans attribute shifting practices in the financial industry to the invisible hand of the market, Mark H. Rose reveals the degree to which presidents, legislators, regulators, and even bankers themselves have long taken an active interest in regulating the industry. In 1971, members of Richard Nixon's Commission on Financial Structure and Regulation described the banks they sought to create as "supermarkets." Analogous to the twentieth-century model of a store at which Americans could buy everything from soft drinks to fresh produce, supermarket banks would accept deposits, make loans, sell insurance, guide mergers and acquisitions, and underwrite stock and bond issues. The...
This volume untangles the multiple threads of the Mexican Revolution to present an accessible introduction to its causes, development, and consequences. Grounded in a detailed narrative that readers can actively explore through accompanying primary sources, the book also provides a broad view of Mexico’s cultural, political, and social evolution from the 1870s to the 1940s. It traces the promises and perils of export-led modernization during the late nineteenth century, the subsequent explosion of popular discontent, the difficult process of reconstruction, and the lasting legacies. The book emphasizes the promises and shortcomings of liberalism; the demands from workers and peasants; the gender underpinnings of revolutionary principles; new forms of authoritarianism; and how conservative resistance curbed the revolution’s reform agenda. Featuring a number of learning tools such as a chronology, glossary, and introduction to key historical figures, The Mexican Revolution is a helpful resource for undergraduate students and non-specialist readers interested in Mexico and its major revolution.
At the same time as modern capitalism became an engine of progress and a source of inequality, the United States rose to global power. Hence diplomacy and the forces of capitalism have continually evolved together and shaped each other at different levels of international, national, and local transformations. Diplomacy and Capitalism focuses on the crucial questions of wealth and power in the United States and the world in the twentieth century. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies on the history of international political economy and its array of state and non-state actors, the volume's authors analyze how material interests and foreign relations shaped each other. How did the risi...
This book provides a concise and accessible history of the relationship between the individual and capitalism in the United States. The text is devoted to tracking the historical development of important themes, whilst addressing key episodes in the progress of American capitalism within these, such as the Great Depression and New Deal. The book will introduce students to the key philosophical principles that have been the most influential in the history of free enterprise in the United States as well as exploring the ways in which these ideas have been popularly understood by Americans from the late eighteenth century to the present. Liberalism and Neoliberalism, entrepreneurialism, slavery and racial capitalism, and business and gender are all assessed. The material in this volume is complimented by a set of primary source documents that bring the subject to life. It will be of interest to students of American history, business and labor history.
Declarations of Dependence rethinks the historical relationship between money and aesthetics in an effort to make critical theory newly answerable to politics. Scott Ferguson regrounds critical theory in the alternative conception of money articulated by the contemporary heterodox school of political economy known as Modern Monetary Theory. Applying the insights of this theory, Ferguson contends that money, rather than representing a private, finite, and alienating technology, is instead a public and fundamentally unlimited medium that harbors still-unrealized powers for inclusion, cultivation, and care. Ferguson calls Modern Monetary Theory’s capacious ontology of money the “unheard-of center” of modern life. Here he installs this unheard-of center at the heart of critique to inaugurate a new critical theory that aims to actualize money’s curative potential in a sensuous here-and-now. Declarations of Dependence reimagines the relation between money and aesthetics in a manner that points beyond neoliberal privation and violence and, by doing so, lends critical theory fresh relevance and force.