The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--And How It Shattered a Nation

Andrew Ross Sorkin · 592 pages

1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that “this time is different.” It's about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming—only to be dismissed until it was too late.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

Daniel Yergin · 885 pages

Chronicles the history of the oil industry and the forces that have shaped the modern world.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson · 496 pages

Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As *Why Nations Fail* shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-mad

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000

Paul Kennedy · 677 pages

El eminente historiador Paul Kennedy analiza y describe el auge y la caída de las grandes potencias a lo largo de los últimos cinco siglos. La nación proyecta su poder militar según sus recursos económicos, pero el alto coste de mantener la supremacía militar la precipita a la decadencia. las grandes potencias en crisis reaccionan gastando más en defensa y se debilitan desviando recursos productiv

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Graeber · 542 pages

The author shows that before there was money, there was debt. For 5,000 years humans have lived in societies divided into debtors and creditors. For 5,000 years debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates, laws and religions. The words “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption” come from ancient debates about debt. These terms and the ideas of debt shape our most basic ideas of r

Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

David M. Kennedy · 936 pages

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. Freedom from Fear tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities. David M. Kennedy demonstrates that the economic crisis of the 1930s was more than a reaction to the excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century

The Economic Consequences of the Peace

John Maynard Keynes

Confidence Men

Ron Suskind · 515 pages

Draws on hundreds of hours of interviews and in-depth research to relate the complete story of the nation's financial meltdown, from the trading floors of lower Manhattan to the power corridors inside the Beltway.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics

Nicholas Wapshott · 400 pages

As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Friedrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene

The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy

Daniel Yergin, Joseph Stanislaw · 476 pages

Civilization: The West and the Rest

Niall Ferguson · 402 pages

What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, was that the West developed six "killer applications"?that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six thing

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein · 619 pages

**The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism** is a 2007 book by the Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein. In the book, Klein argues that neoliberal free market policies (as advocated by the economist Milton Friedman) have risen to prominence in some developed countries because of a deliberate strategy of "shock therapy". This centers on the exploitation of national crises (dis

The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels · 56 pages

"The Communist Manifesto," penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is a revolutionary treatise advocating for the overthrow of capitalist systems and the establishment of a classless society. Published in 1848, its succinct yet powerful prose remains a cornerstone of socialist ideology, inspiring movements worldwide.

Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich

Kevin Phillips · 496 pages

"For more than thirty years, Kevin Phillips' insight into American politics and economics has helped to make history as well as record it. Now he turns his attention to the United States' history of great wealth and power, a sweeping cavalcade from the American Revolution to what he calls "the Second Gilded Age" at the turn of the twenty-first century.". "The Second Gilded Age has been staggering

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

Ira Katznelson · 713 pages

Redefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, this book finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Historian Ira Katznelson asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who saf

The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope

Jonathan Alter · 432 pages

This is the story of a political miracle--the perfect match of man and moment. FDR took office in 1933 as America touched bottom. Banks were closing, millions of people lost everything--the Great Depression had caused a national breakdown. Journalist Alter brings us closer than ever before to the Roosevelt magic. Facing the gravest crisis since the Civil War, instead of circumventing Congress and

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn · 702 pages

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, *A People's History of the United States* is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

David S. Landes · 650 pages

David S. Landes tells the long, fascinating story of wealth and power throughout the world: the creation of wealth, the paths of winners and losers, the rise and fall of nations. He studies history as a process, attempting to understand how the world's cultures lead to - or retard - economic and military success and material achievement. Countries of the West, Landes asserts, prospered early thro

The Great Crash 1929

John Kenneth Galbraith · 206 pages

This classic tome is a detailed economic examination of the 1929 financial collapse written with wit and attitude.

Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America

Adam Cohen · 372 pages

Brings to life a fulcrum moment in American history--the tense, feverish first one hundred days of FDR's presidency, when he and his inner circle completely reinvented the role of the federal government in response to the Crash of 1929 and its consequences.

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

Kenneth Pomeranz · 392 pages

"Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia?". "Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing grow

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

Marc Levinson · 395 pages

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in t

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Sven Beckert · 640 pages

The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new m

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

Liaquat Ahamed · 564 pages

With penetrating insights for today, this vital history of the world economic collapse of the late 1920s offers unforgettable portraits of the four men whose personal and professional actions as heads of their respective central banks changed the course of the twentieth centuryIt is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one p