From an award-winning historian, a stirring (and timely) narrative history of American labor from the dawn of the industrial age to the present day.

Southern slaveholders proudly pronounced themselves orthodox Christians, who accepted responsibility for the welfare of the people who worked for them. They proclaimed that their slaves enjoyed a better and more secure life than any laboring class in the world. Now, did it not follow that the lives of laborers of all races across the world would be immeasurably improved by their enslavement? In the Old South but in no other slave society a doctrine emerged among leading clergymen, politicians, and intellectuals -- "Slavery in the Abstract," which declared enslavement the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race. They joined the Socialists, whom they studied, in believing that the free-labor system, wracked by worsening class warfare, was collapsing. A vital question: to what extent did the people of the several social classes of the South accept so extreme a doctrine? That question lies at the heart of this book.--Publisher.

"Japan and the four little dragons—Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore—constitute less than 1 percent of the world’s land mass and less than 4 percent of the world’s population. Yet in the last four decades they have become, with Europe and North America, one of the three great pillars of the modern industrial world order. How did they achieve such a rapid industrial transformation? Why did the four little dragons, dots on the East Asian periphery, gain such Promethean energy at this particular time in history? Ezra F. Vogel, one of the most widely read scholars on Asian affairs, provides a comprehensive explanation of East Asia’s industrial breakthrough. While others have attributed this success to tradition or to national economic policy, Vogel’s penetrating analysis illuminates how cultural background interacted with politics, strategy, and situational factors to ignite the greatest burst of sustained economic growth the world has yet seen. Vogel describes how each of the four little dragons acquired the political stability needed to take advantage of the special opportunities available to would-be industrializers after World War II. He traces how each little dragon devised a structure and a strategy to hasten industrialization and how firms acquired the entrepreneurial skill, capital, and technology to produce internationally competitive goods. Vogel brings masterly insight to the underlying question of why Japan and the little dragons have been so extraordinarily successful in industrializing while other developing countries have not. No other work has pinpointed with such clarity how institutions and cultural practices rooted in the Confucian tradition were adapted to the needs of an industrial society, enabling East Asia to use its special situational advantages to respond to global opportunities."

Fatherlands explores the nature of identity in nineteenth-century Germany, and has crucial implications for our understanding of nationalism, German unification and the German state in the modern era. It approaches these questions from a new and important angle, that of the non national territorial state, exploring the state-building process in non-Prussian Germany. The issues covered range from railway construction and German industrialization, to the modernization of German monarchy, the emergence of a free press, the development of a modern educational system, and the role of monuments, museums and public festivities.

Text: English, German (translation)