For nearly two centuries the Dutch Republic, despite its small size and population, functioned as the hub of world trade, shipping, and finance. This is the first detailed general account of that hegemony from its origins in the sixteenth century to the final collapse of the Dutch trading system in the eighteenth century. The economic structure of the early modern world was such that the Dutch Republic--particularly its chief business emporium, Amsterdam--was able to dominate the world economy to a far greater degree than any commercial power before or since. Using archival and secondary sources, this book explains how one small nation was able to maintain this ascendancy for so long, and details the mechanisms by which this was achieved and sustained, as well as the stages of its evolution.

Barack Obama’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, inspired the world. But the great promise of “Change We Can Believe In” was immediately tested by the threat of another Great Depression, a worsening war in Afghanistan, and an entrenched and deeply partisan system of business as usual in Washington. Despite all the coverage, the backstory of Obama’s historic first year in office has until now remained a mystery. In The Promise: President Obama, Year One , Jonathan Alter, one of the country’s most respected journalists and historians, uses his unique access to the White House to produce the first inside look at Obama’s difficult debut. What happened in 2009 inside the Oval Office? What worked and what failed? What is the president really like on the job and off-hours, using what his best friend called “a Rubik’s Cube in his brain?" These questions are answered here for the first time. We see how a surprisingly cunning Obama took effective charge in Washington several weeks before his election, made trillion-dollar decisions on the stimulus and budget before he was inaugurated, engineered colossally unpopular bailouts of the banking and auto sectors, and escalated a treacherous war not long after settling into office. The Promise is a fast-paced and incisive narrative of a young risk-taking president carving his own path amid sky-high expectations and surging joblessness. Alter reveals that it was Obama alone—“feeling lucky”—who insisted on pushing major health care reform over the objections of his vice president and top advisors, including his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who admitted that “I begged him not to do this.” Alter takes the reader inside the room as Obama prevents a fistfight involving a congressman, coldly reprimands the military brass for insubordination, crashes the key meeting at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, and bounces back after a disastrous Massachusetts election to redeem a promise that had eluded presidents since FDR. In Alter’s telling, the real Obama is an authentic, demanding, unsentimental, and sometimes overconfident leader. He adapted to the presidency with ease and put more “points on the board” than he is given credit for, but neglected to use his leverage over the banks and failed to connect well with an angry public. We see the famously calm president cursing leaks, playfully trash-talking his advisors, and joking about even the most taboo subjects, still intent on redeeming more of his promise as the problems mount. This brilliant blend of journalism and history offers the freshest reporting and most acute perspective on the biggest story of our time. It will shape impressions of the Obama presidency and of the man himself for years to come.

Dick Cheney is the most powerful yet most unpopular vice president in American history. He has thrived alongside a president who, from day one, had little interest in policy and limited experience in the ways of Washington. Yet Cheney's relentless rise to prominence over three decades has happened almost by stealth. Now veteran reporters Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein reveal the disturbing truth about the man who has successfully co-opted executive control over the U.S. government, serving as the de facto 'shadow president' of the most dominant White House in a generation. Cheney has always been an astute politician. He survived the collapse of the Nixon presidency, finding a position of power in the administration of Gerald Ford. He was then elected to the House of Representatives and later served in the cabinet of the first Bush presidency. But when he became George W. Bush's running mate, Cheney reached a new level of influence. From the engineering of his own selection as vice president to his support of policies allowing torture as a permissible weapon in the 'war on terror', Cheney has consistently steered America to the right. With unique access to numerous first-hand sources, Vice provides an unprecedented expose of Cheney's career. Its startling revelations concern the war in Iraq, his relationship with the CIA and with big business, his involvement with Enron, his attitude towards Iran and his ruthless manoeuvering which today effectively puts him in charge of American policy at home and abroad. In the tradition of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's All the President's Men , this powerful work of investigative journalism takes us behind the scenes in Washington, into hitherto secret meetings and deep into the heart of political decision-making. Utterly gripping, Vice chronicles and exposes the hijacking of the American presidency and illustrates the arrogance of power as never before.

Millions of adult Americans will fondly remember such entertaining movies as Carousel, The Jackpot, and There's No Business Like Show Business. Phoebe and Henry Ephron, who wrote the screenplays for these and other films, were a unique team in that they used their special talents, working with dozens of great names of screen and stage, to create everything from the comic to the somber under circumstances both humorous and quite the opposite. Whether they were working on a Carousel, starring Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae or a new What Price Glory, or Fred Astaire's Daddy Long Legs, the Ephrons were always learning something new and exciting about a magical assortment of people (Henry remembers the famous director John Ford the day he was faulted by his producer for being two days behind in shooting a film. He tore up six pages and said: "Tell the SOB I'm six days ahead!") This is also a story of the thirty-seven-year marriage of two people who started out with very little, realized their dreams of having a play produced on Broadway, and then went to Hollywood, where they wrote major scripts for some of the biggest stars. Woven throughout the story is the family element of raising four daughters in the make-believe atmosphere of Southern California. As the two Ephrons worried about the work they'd done on one major script, the make-believe turning into a glorious reprieve when it was reported to them that Darryl Zanuck had just told a friend, "I'll never know how the Ephrons took that old chestnut and turned it into this great screenplay." Here, a professional storyteller is at his best in a personal narrative which also brings onstage a fascinating supporting cast.

"The 1990s was a decade of extreme change. Shifts in culture, politics, and technology radically altered the way Americans did business, expressed themselves, and thought about their role in the world. At the center of it all was Bill Clinton, the charismatic and flawed baby boomer president, along with his polarizing but increasingly popular wife, Hillary. Although it was in many ways a Democratic Gilded Age, the 1990s was also a time of great anxiety. The Cold War was over. America was stable and prosperous. Yet Americans felt more unmoored and isolated. This was the era of glitz and grunge, when we relished living in the Republic of Everything even as we feared it might degenerate into the Republic of Nothing. Bill Clinton dominated this era, but his complex legacy has yet to be clearly defined. Historian Gil Troy examines Clinton's presidency alongside the decade's cultural changes. Taking the '90s year by year, Troy shows how the culture of the day shaped the Clintons even as the Clintons shaped it, offering answers to two enduring questions about Bill Clinton's legacy: How did such a talented politician leave Americans thinking he accomplished so little when he actually accomplished so much? And to what extent was Clinton responsible for the catastrophes of the following decade, specifically 9/11 and the collapse of the housing market? Even more relevant as we head toward the 2016 election, The Age of Clinton will appeal to readers on both sides of the aisle as it chronicles the wild, transformative decade and the president at its center"--

The photographer Richard Avedon and the writer Doon Arbus began collaborating on this book thirty years ago. The photographs and interviews they did then remain faithful to what was, like the contents of a time capsule. Meeting somebody and balling them means something, but it doesn't mean near as much as it used to. --Janis Joplin, September 1969 In a society where there is institutionalized oppression, the thing is to catch government and business in the grass--actually humping. --Florynce Kennedy, August 1969 I was so afraid of being bad and being caught at it. --Dr. Benjamin Spock, September 1969 The connection between all the rhetoric and all the poetry, between the words of a Black Panther and those of a rock star or a pacifist, between the scars of a pop artist and those of a napalm victim, have haunted and informed the structuring of this book, with its own peculiar version of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

A crucial guide to life before—and after—Tinder, IVF, and robots. What will happen to our notions of marriage and parenthood as reproductive technologies increasingly allow for newfangled ways of creating babies? What will happen to our understanding of gender as medical advances enable individuals to transition from one set of sexual characteristics to another, or to remain happily perched in between? What will happen to love and sex and romance as our relationships migrate from the real world to the Internet? Can people fall in love with robots? Will they? In short, what will happen to our most basic notions of humanity as we entangle our lives and emotions with the machines we have created? In Work Mate Marry Love , Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex. Now, as we enter an era of artificial intelligence and robots, how will our deepest feelings and attachments evolve? In the past, the prevailing modes of production produced a world dominated by heterosexual, mostly-monogamous, two-parent families. In the future, however, these patterns are almost certain to be reshaped, creating entirely new norms for sex and romance, and for the construction of families and the raising of children. Steering clear of both techno-euphoria and alarmism, Spar offers a bold and inclusive vision of how our lives might be changed for the better.

"The tumultuous early years of the young Jewish state are brought to vivid life through the eyes of two German Jewish brothers. Arie survived the Holocaust in Europe. Peter, one year older, was sent to America before the war began. They find each other again in Israel, learning everyone else in their family has been murdered. Peter becomes a top Mossad agent, deeply involved in many of the key spy adventures of the era. Arie becomes a scheming businessman, among the richest men in Israel: one brother is building the state, the other protecting it. But they have fallen in love with the same woman, a Jewish refugee from Egypt. The brothers' jealousies and intrigues are mirrored by the young nation's very own struggles to survive"--

A personal memoir by Eizenstat, who served under President Carter in several capacities, including secretary of state on Holocaust issues, relating his experiences in negotiations with governments of and/or business representatives from Switzerland, Austria, France, and Germany to pay compensation to Holocaust victims or their heirs for looted property and for suffering (slave labor) under the Nazis. Swiss gold, stolen art, and other stolen property of individuals and communities were finally repaid through agreements reached or encouraged by U.S. class-action suits. In addition to the "imperfect justice" of financial recompense, notes the moral success of furthering the truth and inspiring international efforts at Holocaust education. also discusses the author's role in helping establish the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

An Amazon Best History Book of 2019 "A splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people." —Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of great wealth has coincided with the fraying of social ties and the rise of inequality. How did all this come about? In Transaction Man , Nicholas Lemann explains the United States’—and the world’s—great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras. Adolf Berle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s chief theorist of the economy, imagined a society dominated by large corporations, which a newly powerful federal government had forced to become benign and stable institutions, contributing to the public good by offering stable employment and generous pensions. By the 1970s, the corporations’ large stockholders grew restive under this regime, and their chief theoretician, Harvard Business School’s Michael Jensen, insisted that firms should maximize shareholder value, whatever the consequences. Today, Silicon Valley titans such as the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman hope “networks” can reknit our social fabric. Lemann interweaves these fresh and vivid profiles with a history of the Morgan Stanley investment bank from the 1930s through the financial crisis of 2008, while also tracking the rise and fall of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and the family-run car dealerships at its heart. Incisive and sweeping, Transaction Man is the definitive account of the reengineering of America and the enormous impact it has had on us all.

فى نهاية الخمسينات عثر الباحث الإقتصادى الأمريكى ديفيد لاندز على أرشيف سرى فى باريس يحتوى على مراسلات اثنين من كبار ممولى الخديوى اسماعيل الأجانب. وقد ألقت هذه المراسلات ضوءا جديدا على قصة النهب الأوروبى لثروة مصر فى عهد أسرة محمد على, والوصول بها إلى مرحلة الخراب ثم الإحتلال ...يحتوى الكتاب أيضا على دراسة للمترجم وهو المفكر اليسارى د. عبد العظيم أنيس - أحد رواد النضال الوطنى والتقدمى منذ الأربعينات - بعنوان : الخراب الحديث لمصر المحروسة

Best-selling author Richard Lederer offers a chorus of praise to those who change our lives one day and one lesson at a time. Readers will meet great teachers throughout history, as well as educators captured in literature, film, and comic strips. Offering compelling proof that teachers really do make a difference in the English, math, history, and science classrooms, A Tribute to Teachers celebrates the most unheralded, exhausting, income-challenged, and ultimately rewarding of all professions.

An examination of the development of the non-Zionist Jewish socialist Bund in Russia, Labour Zionism, and the American Jewish Labour movement, portraying their often bitter struggles with each other and with non-Jewish socialist movements, especially in Russia.

What is the exact nature of the consumption function? Can this term be defined so that it will be consistent with empirical evidence and a valid instrument in the hands of future economic researchers and policy makers? In this volume a distinguished American economist presents a new theory of the consumption function, tests it against extensive statistical J material and suggests some of its significant implications. Central to the new theory is its sharp distinction between two concepts of income, measured income, or that which is recorded for a particular period, and permanent income, a longer-period concept in terms of which consumers decide how much to spend and how much to save. Milton Friedman suggests that the total amount spent on consumption is on the average the same fraction of permanent income, regardless of the size of permanent income. The magnitude of the fraction depends on variables such as interest rate, degree of uncertainty relating to occupation, ratio of wealth to income, family size, and so on. The hypothesis is shown to be consistent with budget studies and time series data, and some of its far-reaching implications are explored in the final chapter.

This landmark work from a renowned feminist historian is a foundational demonstration of the uses of gender as a conceptual tool for cultural and historical analysis. Joan Wallach Scott offers a trenchant critique of the compartmentalization of women's history, arguing that political and social categories are always fundamentally shaped by gender and that questions of gender are essential to considerations of difference in history. Exploring topics ranging from language and class to the politics of work and family, Gender and the Politics of History is a vital contribution to feminist history and historical methodology that also speaks more broadly to the ongoing redefinition of gender in our political and cultural vocabularies. This anniversary edition of a classic text in feminist theory and history shows the evergreen relevance of Scott's work to the humanities and social sciences. In a new preface, Scott reflects on the book's legacy and implications for contemporary politics as well as what she has reconsidered as a result of her engagement with psychoanalytic theory. The book also includes a previously unpublished essay, "The Conundrum of Equality," which takes up the question of affirmative action.

A scathing expos of the link between major U.S. corporations and the holocaust makes sobering indictments about such companies as IBM, General Motors, and the Rockefeller Foundation, revealing how some of their mid-twentieth-century agendas directly or indirectly supported Nazi activities.

On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (19 April 1817) is a book by David Ricardo on economics. The book concludes that land rent grows as population increases. It also presents the theory of comparative advantage, the theory that free trade between two or more countries can be mutually beneficial, even when one country has an absolute advantage over the other countries in all areas of production.

Business, Political Science, American Studies, Philosophy

By focusing on the human side as well as the intellectual dimensions of how economists work and think, this collection of interviews with top economists of the 20th century becomes a startling and lively introduction to the modern world of macroeconomics. A fun read! For more information, frequent updates, and to comment on the forthcoming book, visit William A. Barnett's weblog at http://economistmind.blogspot.com/. Acclaim for Inside the Economist's Mind "In candid interviews, these great economists prove to be fabulous story tellers of their lives and times. Unendingly gripping for insiders, this book should also help non-specialists understand how economists think." Professor Julio Rotemberg, Harvard University Business School, and Editor, Review of Economics and Statistics. "Economics used to be called the 'dismal science'. It will be impossible for anybody to hold that view anymore ... This is science with flesh and blood, and a lot of fascinating stories that you will find nowhere else." Dr. Jean-Pascal Bénassy, Paris-Jourdan Sciences Économiques, Paris, France "This book provides a rare and intriguing view of the personal and professional lives of leading economists ... It is like A Beautiful Mind , scaled by a factor of 16 [the number of interviews in the book]." Professor Lee Ohanian, University of California at Los Angeles " ... if you want an insider view of how economics has been developing in the last decades, this is the (only) book for you." Professor Giancarlo Gandolfo, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza,’ Rome "Here we see the HUMAN side of path-breaking research, the personalities and pitfalls, the DRAMA behind the science." Professor Francis X. Diebold, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that “you should not read it if you cannot take a punch.” The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make , filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its “nobodies nobody knows”: the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets. Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall’s business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city’s breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence. The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, “the best book about Chicago.”