This is the full story of the shocking true crime which still haunts this nation, the sex killing of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by sweatshop operator and B'nai B'rith official Leo Frank in Atlanta, Georgia in 1913 -- and also the story of the tremendous political and economic forces attempting to exonerate the killer even today. This innocent young girl's death has been the stuff of mystery, song, legal corruption, public outrage, vengeance, ethnic conflict, and accusations of racism and anti-Semitism. This is the author's much-expanded edition of her original book, more than twice the size of the first edition, with much more extensive contemporary documentation -- and in-depth analysis of the highly politicized lobbying and literature that has grown up around this case. It is written by Mary Phagan-Kean -- the great-niece of Mary Phagan, the 1913 murder victim.

The 1990s saw the best economic performance in the United States in three decades. Strong economic growth and falling unemployment were accompanied by low inflation and rising budget surpluses. Although personal bankruptcies climbed, the personal saving rate fell, and the trade deficit expanded, overall, U.S. economic performance during the 1990s was outstanding. This book is a unique attempt to write the first history of the making of American economic policy during the 1990s. One way to view it is as a "debriefing" of those who made the decisions. Each chapter is devoted to a particular area of economic policy and consists of a background paper written by leading academic economists together with short essays by prominent policymakers, many of whom served in the Clinton administration or previous administrations, and by independent observers. The questions asked about each policy area include: What were the pros and cons of alternative options under consideration? What decision was made? What were the relevant economic arguments for that decision, and what political interests were served? Were other options missing from consideration? Is it possible to judge whether the decision was the right one? Are there lessons for the future?

Here is an eye-opening look at one of baseball's most intriguing and little known stories: the many-faceted relationship between Jews and black baseball in Jim Crow America. In Out of Left Field, Rebecca Alpert explores how Jewish sports entrepreneurs, political radicals, and a team of black Jews from Belleville, Virginia called the Belleville Grays--the only Jewish team in the history of black baseball--made their mark on the segregated world of the Negro Leagues. Through in-depth research, Alpert tells the stories of the Jewish businessmen who owned and promoted teams as they both acted out and fell victim to pervasive stereotypes of Jews as greedy middlemen and hucksters. Some Jewish owners produced a kind of comedy baseball, akin to basketball's Harlem Globetrotters--indeed, Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein was very active in black baseball--that reaped financial benefits for both owners and players but also played upon the worst stereotypes of African Americans and prevented these black "showmen" from being taken seriously by the major leagues. But Alpert also shows how Jewish entrepreneurs, motivated in part by the traditional Jewish commitment to social justice, helped grow the business of black baseball in the face of the oppressive Jim Crow restrictions, and how radical journalists writing for the Communist Daily Worker argued passionately for an end to baseball's segregation. In fact, the campaign to convince manager Branch Rickey to integrate the Brooklyn Dodgers was initiated by Daily Worker sports writer Bill Mardo, in an open letter in the paper. Deftly written and meticulously researched, Out of Left Field offers a unique perspective on the economic and social negotiations between blacks and Jews in the first half of the 20th century, shedding new light on the intersection of race, religion, and sports in America.

Nearly forty years after researchers first sought to determine the effects, if any, on children adopted by families whose racial or ethnic background differed from their own, the debate over transracial adoption continues. In this collection of interviews conducted with black and biracial young adults who were adopted by white parents, the authors present the personal stories of two dozen individuals who hail from a wide range of religious, economic, political, and professional backgrounds. How does the experience affect their racial and social identities, their choice of friends and marital partners, and their lifestyles? In addition to interviews, the book includes overviews of both the history and current legal status of transracial adoption.

In Two Lucky People , Rose and Milton Friedman provide a memorable and lively account of their lives, the people they knew, and the work they shared. Their involvement with world leaders and many of this century's most important public policy issues moves their memoir beyond the merely personal and makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century ideas. "The Friedmans come across as the last Enlightenment thinkers in a post-modern world. . . . This is a book that restores your faith in reasoned discourse. . . . There really are people who believe in scholarly exchange as a way to discover truth."—David Brooks, New York Times Book Review "The Friedmans are a feisty couple, who clearly delight in their lives and each other. And shining through their reticence, and their conservatism, is a decency that even liberals will recognize."—Milton and Judith Viorst, Washington Post Book World "This engaging book recounts the life and contributions of one of America's most influential writers and economists in the second half of the twentieth century. And her husband's no slouch either. . . . An indispensable guide through the evolution of economic thought."—Stephen Moore, National Review "A thought-provoking book and one rich in history, the personal history of the Friedmans . . . and the cultural and political history of our country."—Steve Huntley, Chicago Sun-Times Books "[ Two Lucky People ] is almost like a letter from a couple of old friends—a couple of old friends who had a long, compelling intellectual journey, came to know some of the great world leaders of this century, and had 60 years of happy, supportive marriage."—N. Gregory Mankiw, Fortune "A rich autobiographical and historical panorama."—William P. Kucewicz, Wall Street Journal

This is the first book in a two-part collection of 264 primary source documents from the Enlightenment to 1950 chronicling the public debate that raged in Europe and America over the role of women in Western society. The present volume looks at the period from 1750 to 1880. The central issues—motherhood, women's legal position in the family, equality of the sexes, the effect on social stability of women's education and labor—extended to women the struggle by men for personal and political liberty. These issues were political, economic, and religious dynamite. They exploded in debates of philosophers, political theorists, scientists, novelists, and religious and political leaders. This collection emphasizes the debate by juxtaposing prevailing and dissenting points of view at given historical moments (e.g. Madame de Staël vs. Rousseau, Eleanor Marx vs. Pope Leo XIII, Strindberg vs. Ibsen, Simone de Beauvoir vs. Margaret Mead). Each section is preceded by a contextual headnote pinpointing the documents significance. Many of the documents have been translated into English for the first time.

No one has more authority to call the shots the way they really are than Paul Krugman, whose provocative New York Times columns are keenly followed by millions. One of the world's most respected economists, Krugman has been named America's most important columnist by the Washington Monthly and columnist of the year by Editor and Publisher magazine. In this long-awaited work containing Krugman's most influential columns along with new commentary, he chronicles how the boom economy unraveled: how exuberance gave way to pessimism, how the age of corporate heroes gave way to corporate scandals, how fiscal responsibility collapsed. From his account of the secret history of the California energy crisis to his devastating dissections of dishonesty in the Bush administration, Krugman tells the uncomfortable truth about how the United States lost its way. And he gives us the road map we will need to follow if we are to get the country back on track.

A sweeping reexamination of the Founding Father who transformed the United States in each of his political “lives”—as a revolutionary thinker, as a partisan political strategist, and as a president “In order to understand America and its Constitution, it is necessary to understand James Madison.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci Over the course of his life, James Madison changed the United States three times: First, he designed the Constitution, led the struggle for its adoption and ratification, then drafted the Bill of Rights. As an older, cannier politician he co-founded the original Republican party, setting the course of American political partisanship. Finally, having pioneered a foreign policy based on economic sanctions, he took the United States into a high-risk conflict, becoming the first wartime president and, despite the odds, winning. Now Noah Feldman offers an intriguing portrait of this elusive genius and the constitutional republic he created—and how both evolved to meet unforeseen challenges. Madison hoped to eradicate partisanship yet found himself giving voice to, and institutionalizing, the political divide. Madison’s lifelong loyalty to Thomas Jefferson led to an irrevocable break with George Washington, hero of the American Revolution. Madison closely collaborated with Alexander Hamilton on the Federalist papers—yet their different visions for the United States left them enemies. Alliances defined Madison, too. The vivacious Dolley Madison used her social and political talents to win her husband new supporters in Washington—and define the diplomatic customs of the capital’s society. Madison’s relationship with James Monroe, a mixture of friendship and rivalry, shaped his presidency and the outcome of the War of 1812. We may be more familiar with other Founding Fathers, but the United States today is in many ways Madisonian in nature. Madison predicted that foreign threats would justify the curtailment of civil liberties. He feared economic inequality and the power of financial markets over politics, believing that government by the people demanded resistance to wealth. Madison was the first Founding Father to recognize the importance of public opinion, and the first to understand that the media could function as a safeguard to liberty. The Three Lives of James Madison is an illuminating biography of the man whose creativity and tenacity gave us America’s distinctive form of government. His collaborations, struggles, and contradictions define the United States to this day.

While today the Nazi genocide of Jews is seen as a massacre unique in its savagery and a central feature of World War II, in 1933-45 it was accepted in the USA, and in the Western world in general, as one of the many wartime brutalities, almost understandable and predictable. Political leaders, public opinion, and later the Allied military greeted the first news concerning the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews with disbelief; later, when the facts of the Nazi mass murder of Jews became apparent, they tended to conflate the Nazi victimization of Jews with that of other ethnic groups. There was a tendency to diminish the scope of the genocide and even to see it as, at least partly, deserved by the victims. These views found expression in a commonly shared reluctance to receive Jewish refugees from Nazism. Opinion polls of the late 1930s-early 1940s show that the American public was consistently against any relaxation of immigration restrictions. In Western Europe and the rest of the Americas, sentiments were similar: some countries were ready to admit Poles, Czechs, and other refugees, but not Jews. These sentiments can only partly be ascribed to the economic hardships of the 1930s; their main cause was antisemitism, ethnic opposition to the Jewish alien. In the postwar years, the tendency to silence and trivialize the Holocaust persevered; it was only in the 1960s that public opinion recognized the Holocaust as unique. Argues against Peter Novick's view, according to which Holocaust memory initially fell victim to the Cold War. Contends that, in the 1960s, most people thought that the "Jewish question" was finally solved - by emancipation, assimilation and, last but not least, by the Nazi mass murder.

A comprehensive examination of Jewish influence and participation in the American popular music business, that weaves together cultural, political, musical and economic history.

Looking at the figures for movie attendance in the 1930s, one might conclude that the America of the Great Depression was a land of Bijous, Gems, Orpheums, Strands, and Rivieras. Americans needed their movies, as Mr. Bergman notes, and they needed them not just for escape. In We're in the Money, Mr. Bergman looks at the films of the thirties (many of them which we now regard as classics) and shows how Hollywood helped prop up the nation's fundamental institutions during the gravest economic crisis in history. Movies, he demonstrates, kept alive the myth of a mobile and classless society, focused on the endless possibilities for individual success, turned social evil into personal evil, and made the New Deal into a veritable leading man. "The kind of book that both old film buffs and the new post-grads of Sesame Street' can really enjoy. It makes history fun, enables teachers and kids to test out their own assumptions about how the 30s turned out the gangsters, the hi-steppers, the FBI gurus, the zany anarchists and the mythical down-on-the-farm good guys who took on the whole punchy and reeling microcosm of America." Robert Geller, Center for Understanding Media. "First rate. It should stand for a long time as a pioneer work in a field where all too little has been written." Alfred B. Rollins, Jr."

When Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office for the presidency in 1801, the United States had just passed through twelve critical years, years dominated by some of the towering figures of our history and by the challenge of having to do everything for the first time. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and Jefferson himself each had a share in setting the nation's important precedents, in organizing the public finances, and in attempting - though with minimal success - to compel respect for the American republic from the powers of Europe. The historical era bounded by those first years is brilliantly represented in The Age of Federalism. Written by esteemed historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism gives us a reflective, deeply informed analytical survey of this extraordinary period. Ranging over the widest variety of concerns - political, cultural, economic, diplomatic, military - the authors keep in view not only the problems the new nation faced but also the particular individuals who tried, with mixed results, to solve them. They intersperse their account with subtly perceptive (and sometimes delightful) character sketches, not only of the great central figures - Washington and Jefferson, Talleyrand and Napoleon Bonaparte - but also of various lesser ones, such as George Hammond, Britain's frustrated minister to the United States, James McHenry, Adams's hapless Secretary of War, a pre-Chief Justice version of John Marshall, and others. They weave these lively profiles into an analysis of the major controversies of the time in an effort to recover something that is now two centuries out of reach, the psychology of a generation of nation-builders, not all of it attractive. The moral urgency of these issues, and the bitterness of the disagreements over them, reflected a fearful sense that the entire future hung on the particular way any one of them was settled. We thus see, for example, how the fight over Hamilton's Treasury system widened an ideological gulf between Hamilton and the Virginians, Madison and Jefferson, that became unbridgeable; how their divisions came to involve questions of foreign relations as well as domestic policy; and how the passions thus generated led to what everyone professed to deplore, the formation of political parties. The most complex issues and episodes are presented with a clarity and a connectedness that they have seldom had in previous treatments. We get a fresh reading of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, the Adams presidency, the XYZ Affair, the naval Quasi-War with France, and the desperate Federalist maneuvers in 1800, first to prevent the reelection of Adams and then to nullify the election of Jefferson. The statesmen of the founding generation, the authors concede, did "a surprising number of things right." Some things, however, went resoundingly wrong: the hopelessly underfinanced effort to construct a capital city on the Potomac (it would have made far more sense, the authors argue, to leave it in New York); the drive in 1798 to form a mighty army that virtually nobody wanted; and prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts which turned into a comic nightmare. The Age of Federalism is the fruit of many years of study and discussion. It combines breadth of scholarship with those touches already familiar in the authors' previous handling of historical subjects: analogies, fascinating side-excursions, counterfactual projections, and understated irony, all couched in a prose that is graceful and lucid. With it, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have produced a comprehensive synthesis, long awaited by historians, of our early national era.

Listen to a short interview with Risa Goluboff Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane In this groundbreaking book, Risa L. Goluboff offers a provocative new account of the history of American civil rights law. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education has long dominated that history. Since 1954, generations of judges, lawyers, and ordinary people have viewed civil rights as a project of breaking down formal legal barriers to integration, especially in the context of public education. Goluboff recovers a world before Brown , a world in which civil rights was legally, conceptually, and constitutionally up for grabs. Then, the petitions of black agricultural workers in the American South and industrial workers across the nation called for a civil rights law that would redress economic as well as legal inequalities. Lawyers in the new Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice and in the NAACP took the workers' cases and viewed them as crucial to attacking Jim Crow. By the time NAACP lawyers set out on the path to Brown , however, they had eliminated workers' economic concerns from their litigation agenda. When the lawyers succeeded in Brown , they simultaneously marginalized the host of other harms--economic inequality chief among them--that afflicted the majority of African Americans during the mid-twentieth century. By uncovering the lost challenges workers and their lawyers launched against Jim Crow in the 1940s, Goluboff shows how Brown only partially fulfilled the promise of civil rights.

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.

Business, Political Science, American Studies, Philosophy

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.

How diverse can, and should, TV programming be? And especially, in what precise ways does governmental regulation of TV affect (or fail to affect) the programs station owners produce—programs which, in the final analysis, shape in such large measure the values of Americans? It is to these timely and beguiling questions that Harvey Levin addresses his dispassionate assessment of the complex relationship between government and the TV industry. Analyzing data drawn from the history of the FCC's regulatory decisions, as well as from interviews with numerous government and industry officials, Professor Levin shows how the present form of restrictive governmental regulation almost always results in higher profits and rents for TV stations, with no concomitant increase in programming diversity. In addition, Professor Levin investigates various other aspects of the media market, from the particular kinds of crucial decisions that are made when, for example, a newspaper owns a TV station, to the kinds of problems that arise when commercial rents are taxed to fund public TV; from the brand of programming we are offered when a monopoly controls a given TV market to the nature of programming in a situation of steady and fair competition. Following a comprehensive assessment, the author makes a compelling case for diversification of station ownership, in order to be "safe rather than sorry." He also argues for the entry of new stations, more extensive support of public TV, and some form of quantitative program requirements—all of which will help bring about greater program diversity. Professor Levin's volume provides us with a fully documented and sharply focused analysis of the theories, policies, and problems of one of the most powerful and misunderstood of contemporary institutions.

Their names linger in memory mainly as punch lines, synonyms for obscurity: Millard Fillmore, Chester Arthur, Calvin Coolidge. They conjure up not the White House so much as a decaying middle school somewhere in New Jersey. But many forgotten presidents, writes Michael J. Gerhardt, were not weak or ineffective. They boldly fought battles over constitutional principles that resonate today. Gerhardt, one of our leading legal experts, tells the story of The Forgotten Presidents. He surveys thirteen administrations in chronological order, from Martin Van Buren to Franklin Pierce to Jimmy Carter, distinguishing political failures from their constitutional impact. Again and again, he writes, they defied popular opinion to take strong stands. Martin Van Buren reacted to an economic depression by withdrawing federal funds from state banks in an attempt to establish the controversial independent treasury system. His objective was to shrink the federal role in the economy, but also to consolidate his power to act independently as president. Prosperity did not return, and he left office under the shadow of failure. Grover Cleveland radically changed his approach in his second (non-consecutive) term. Previously he had held back from interference with lawmakers; on his return to office, he aggressively used presidential power to bend Congress to his will. Now seen as an asterisk, Cleveland consolidated presidential authority over appointments, removals, vetoes, foreign affairs, legislation, and more. Jimmy Carter, too, proves surprisingly significant. In two debt-ceiling crises and battles over the Panama Canal treaty, affirmative action, and the First Amendment, he demonstrated how the presidency's inherent capacity for efficiency and energy gives it an advantage in battles with Congress, regardless of popularity. Gerhardt explains the many things these and ten other presidents have in common that explain why, in spite of any of their excesses, they have become forgotten chief executives. Incisive, myth-shattering, and compellingly written, this book shows how even obscure presidents championed the White House's prerogatives and altered the way we interpret the Constitution.

For the past fifty years, prize-winning historian Martin Duberman’s groundbreaking writings have established him as one of our preeminent public intellectuals. Founder of the first graduate program in LGBT studies in the country, he is perhaps best known for his biographies of Paul Robeson, Lincoln Kirstein, and Howard Zinn—works that have been hailed as “magnificent” (USA Today), “enthralling” (The Washington Post), “splendid” and “definitive” (Studs Terkel, Chicago Sun-Times), and “refreshing and inspiring” (The New York Times). Duberman is also an equally gifted playwright and essayist, whose piercingly honest memoirs Cures and Midlife Queer have been called “witty and searingly candid” (Publishers Weekly), “wrenchingly eloquent” (Newsday), and “a moving chronicle” (The Nation). His writings have explored the shocking attempts by the medical establishment to “cure” homosexuality; Stonewall, before and after; the age of AIDS; the struggle for civil rights; the fight for economic and racial justice; and Duberman’s vision for reclaiming a radical queer past from the creeping centrism of the gay movement. The Martin Duberman Reader assembles the core of Duberman’s most important writings, offering a wonderfully comprehensive overview of our lives and times—and giving us a crucial touchstone for a new generation of activists, scholars, and readers.

The renowned economist discusses the impending global economic crisis and the eight-step program that America can begin in order to head it off