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Previous Newsletter Issues
Stanger, Howard R.
Labor and Employment History
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
North America
Mar 11, 1998
EH-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Business@eh.net (March, 1998)
Garth L. Mangum and R. Scott McNabb. The Rise, Fall, and Replacement of Industrywide Bargaining in the Basic Steel Industry. Labor and Human Resources Series. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. xvii + 209 pp. Tables, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $62.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-56324-982-0; $21.95 (paper), ISBN 1-56324-983-9.
Reviewed for H-Business by Howard Stanger , Buffalo State College
Economists Garth Mangum and R. Scott McNabb have written a very good overview of collective bargaining in basic steel since the historic 1937 agreement between the leader of the industry's oligopoly--U.S. Steel--and the Steel Workers' Organizing...
Berkowitz, Edward
Markets and Institutions
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
North America
Feb 27, 1998
Sanford M. Jacoby. Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xii + 345 pp. Notes and index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-691-01570-8.
Reviewed for H-Business by Edward Berkowitz , George Washington University
Welfare capitalism represents one of those marginal academic side-shows that nonetheless has surprising staying power. At various times historians have shown interest in ways that firms have distinguished themselves by being model employers. The heads of these firms, unlike their stereotypical colleagues, do not believe in the classical theory of labor supply in which workers present themselves in an infinite supply at the market price. Instead, they...
Hausman, William J.
Macroeconomics and Fluctuations
20th Century: Pre WWII
North America
Feb 27, 1998
EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by EH.NET (February 1998)
Bernard C. Beaudreau, Mass Production, the Stock Market Crash, and the Great Depression: The Macroeconomics of Electrification. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. xx + 182 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN: 031329920X.
Reviewed for EH.NET by William J. Hausman, Department of Economics, College of William and Mary.
Beaudreau asserts boldly on the first page of his book that his purpose is to "provide a definitive account of the Great Depression and the events leading up to this cataclysmic event" (p. xv). At least he didn't claim to have written "the" definitive account. In fact, this is a highly idiosyncratic treatment that explores a number of events of...
Cochran, David
Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
North America
Feb 10, 1998
Thomas Frank. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xii + 287 pages. Appendix, tables, notes, and index. $22.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-226-25991-9.
Reviewed for H-Net by David Cochran, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale
In 1968, Petrocelli sport coats adopted the advertising slogan "Tune in. Turn on. Step out." This gloss on one of the most famous slogans of the counterculture--Timothy Leary's "Tune in. Turn on. Drop out."--symbolizes the paradoxical relationship between American consumer capitalism and the counterculture of the sixties. As Thomas Frank argues in this fine book, American business underwent its own cultural...
Frey, Donald
Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender
General or Comparative
North America
Feb 9, 1998
EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by EH.NET (February 1998)
Paul Bernstein, American Work Values: Their Origin and Development. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. 368 pp. $59.50 (cloth), ISBN: 079143257.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Donald Frey, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.
Bernstein surveys a massive literature about work values and attitudes, including a wide array of primary sources. The bibliography alone is some 66 pages and runs the gamut from original Puritan expositions of the "Protestant ethic" through some of the most recent opinion surveys on work attitudes. Someone interested in this field should check this book if for the bibliography alone.
As the bibliography makes clear, this...
Bruni, Luigino
History of Economic Thought; Methodology
19th Century
Europe
Feb 5, 1998
EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by EH.NET (February 1998)
Mario Baldassarri, editor, Maffeo Pantaleoni: At the Origin of the Italian School of Economics and Finance. New York: St. Martin's Press and London: Macmillan Press (in Association with Rivista di Politica Economica, Sipi, Roma), 1997. v + 209 pp. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN: 031217358X.
Reviewed by EH.NET by Luigino Bruni, School of Economic and Social Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich (UK).
Maffeo Pantaleoni (1857-1924) is one the most original and complex figures in the history of Italian economics. One of the founders of pure economics, his Principii di Economia pura (Barbera, 1889) [English Translation ...
McCants, Anne E. C.
International and Domestic Trade and Relations
19th Century
Latin America, incl. Mexico and the Caribbean
Feb 4, 1998
EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by EH.NET (February 1998)
Benjamin Orlove, editor, The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. viii + 226 pp. $42.50 (cloth), ISBN: 0472106643.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Anne E.C. McCants, Department of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
One of the drawbacks of the standard geographical organization of the historical discipline (broadly defined to include economic history and historical anthropology and sociology) is that scholarship about those regions considered peripheral to Europe and the United States is little read outside of its own subfield. This isolation occurs despite the fact...
Murray, John E.
Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender
20th Century: Pre WWII
North America
Feb 2, 1998
EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by EH.NET (February 1998)
Donald E. Pitzer, editor, America's Communal Utopias. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xxi + 537 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2299-X. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-4609-0.
Reviewed for EH.NET by John E. Murray, Department of Economics, University of Toledo.
This book consists of 18 essays on American communal societies that were founded before the middle of the present century. The authors are well known specialists in their fields and include several (Priscilla Brewer, Carl Guarneri, and Robert Sutton among them) who have written well received monographs on particular groups. Each chapter contains an essay, endnotes, a...
Shearer, Ronald A.
Industry: Manufacturing and Construction
General or Comparative
Europe
Jan 28, 1998
EH-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Business@eh.net (January, 1998)
Gary Herrigel. Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power. Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences Series, 9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. x + 480 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, maps, and index. $54.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-46273-8.
Reviewed for H-Business by Ronald A. Shearer , University of British Columbia
The question, addressed in this book is: does the literature on German industrialization accurately describe the process that occurred? Alternatively, considering the long sweep of history, how did one of the most successful examples of industrialization in modern times come to pass?...
Costa, Dora L.
Labor and Employment History
19th Century
North America
Jan 20, 1998
EH.NET BOOK REVIEW Published by EH.NET (January 1998) Patrick J. Kelly, Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans' Welfare State 1860-1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. viii + 250 pp. $37.50 (cloth), ISBN: 0-674-17560-3. Reviewed for EH.NET by Dora L. Costa, Department of Economics, MIT.
Union Army veterans and the programs that benefited them have received considerable attention of late. This reviewer has used the wealth of records generated by the Union Army pension program to study the evolution of retirement, taking advantage of the peculiarities of the program for statistical identification. The most common focus, however, has been not on the veterans as data, but on why veterans' programs...