What are American ideas and values? It argues that by looking at the intersection of capitalism and democracy, we can see where we as a nation have come from and where we might be going in the future.
Historical and contemporary advertisements are also featured, emphasizing the evolution of the relationship between producers and consumers over time. American business people have built the most creative and productive economy in world history.
Here is the story of the men and women who made America - from Pilgrim traders to pioneers of the Industrial Revolution and the great innovators of the early twentieth century.
The effect of a commercialized Internet on American business, from the boom ine-commerce and adjustments by bricks-and-mortar businesses to file-sharing and communitybuilding. In this wide-ranging study Stephen Foster explores Puritanism in England and America from its roots in the Elizabethan era to the end of the seventeenth century.
Focusing on Puritanism as a cultural and political phenomenon as well as a religious movement, Foster addresses parallel developments on both sides of the Atlantic and firmly embeds New England Puritanism within its English context.
He provides not only an elaborate critque of current interpretations of Puritan ideology but also an original and insightful portrayal of its dynamism.
According to Foster, Puritanism represented a loose and incomplete alliance of progressive Protestants, lay and clerical, aristocratic and humble, who never decided whether they were the vanguard or the remnant.
Indeed, in Foster's analysis, changes in New England Puritanism after the first decades of settlement did not indicate secularization and decline but instead were part of a pattern of change, conflict, and accomodation that had begun in England. He views the Puritans' own claims of declension as partisan propositions in an internal controversy as old as the Puritan movement itself.
The result of these stresses and adaptations, he argues, was continued vitality in American Puritanism during the second half of the seventeenth century. The logo for the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation from left. IBM, Microsoft, and Apple, along with numerous start-ups that were swallowed up into larger firms, used government-sponsored research to produce new products, the most ubiquitous of which was the mobile phone. After deregulation of the energy sector in the late s, exploration for oil and gas expanded, and the increased supply led to generally lower prices over time for both.
Government subsidies in the form of tax breaks shored up the expansion, as did technological developments, particularly horizontal drilling. Energy utilities and producers began constructing LNG plants in order to transport natural gas overseas. Oil pipeline firms requested permits for even more pipelines to transport the extra crude being produced. Meanwhile, a variety of subsidy programs on the local, state, and national levels—touted by environmental groups—supported energy efficiency programs improved construction techniques, better insulation and the adoption of non-carbon-based energy sources, such as wind, solar, and geothermal.
The rise of these alternative energy sources recently led to a reduction in the use of coal, which had sustained the generation of electricity for much of the 20 th century. In addition, environmental groups—worried about rising levels of CO 2 in the atmosphere and resulting climate changes—succeeded in litigating against the expansion of coal-fired electric plants.
A graph based on data from showing the relationship between overall urban density and transportation energy use right. By the middle of s, government subsidies and consumer choices had altered the American energy mix. Natural gas was replacing coal-fired plants. More and more consumers were choosing to put solar panels on their roofs or in their yards or chose an electricity provider who purchased from alternative energy sources.
Today, the use of home-based solar panels is challenging the prevailing infrastructure system of centralized electric generation: Should customers with solar panels be able to sell back electricity to the utility? How much should they pay to be connected in case their local generation fails?
Are customers without the ability to purchase solar panels at a disadvantage? Will the centralized, large-scale, twentieth-century utility model continue?
Solar Panels on the roof of a house near Boston, MA right. The deregulation movement for banks spanned from the s to the late s. Bankers wanted freedom to offer more services to customers, from checking and savings accounts to credit cards to stock brokerage accounts so that they could earn more profit for themselves and their stock holders. The Clinton administration oversaw the final move to eliminate one of the most important New Deal laws—the Glass-Steagall Act of Now banks could be both investment and commercial banks, and could link the two together.
Since the s, regulatory oversight of most banking activity had been relaxed, either through legislation or executive action. A protestor at the Occupy Wall Street Protests in with a sign calling for the re-regulation of banks left. To stimulate more home ownership, politicians relaxed oversight of mortgage-granting institutions and the secondary markets for mortgages.
More and more Americans bought houses they could not afford. This lack of regulatory oversight contributed to the financial crisis of and the subsequent Great Recession. The most significant infrastructure development of the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries is without a doubt the Internet. A map depicting the places connected to the Internet in right. Satellite communications and telephone wires, connected initially to four computers in the late s, expanded to 2, computers in the s.
The U. Business applications were so apparent and compelling that the NSF gave up its role in , about five years after the Internet had been privatized. Where there had been 25 linked networks in the early s, there were 44, by the mids. In , 90, Americans used the Internet regularly; by , 90 million did so. By the end of , 3. A map showing global Web Index scores—a composite statistic assessing various measures such as universal access to the World Wide Web.
The Internet morphed into an economic and cultural phenomenon that served the private sector and inspired entrepreneurship around the world. This could not have happened without the invention of the World Wide Web in the late s and s. Economically, the Web and Internet present extraordinary opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop and sell products and services.
Servers for the Wikimedia Foundation right top. The logo for Amazon. A drawing of the Internet of Things, web-connected devices like a drone, a plant, a home, music, and clothing bottom right.
Perhaps as important is the so-called Internet of Things. Sometime in or there were more things connected to the Internet than people: home control systems, banking accounts, security video cameras, automobile systems, dogs, cows, and so much more.
In , it was estimated that 25 billion things were connected to the Internet. Some argue that the private sector, being mindful of profit, will hold down costs and thus furnish infrastructure more efficiently than can governments. However, road projects in Indiana, Texas, and California have shown that not to be the case. Privatization of municipal and state infrastructures water, parking meters, police and fire, prisons has not always gone well.
But some of the P-3s Public-Private Partnerships have. These successes have included emphasis on transparency throughout the process of bidding, construction and operation, and on hiring private specialists. There is another approach that has been successful. The American air traffic control ATC system and airport services are woefully inadequate and behind the times in large measure because lawmakers have not invested enough and bureaucracy has stymied innovation.
Air Force left. Built in , the air traffic control tower at the John F. Kennedy International Airport handles over 1, flights a day right.
Installation of the latest technology has made the airlines safer and more economical in Canada. The mixed public-private approach is a strength, but not spending enough on infrastructure maintenance and expansion is a weakness that has plagued the American political economy since the s.
During that same time, moreover, some Americans have grown fabulously wealthy while many others have stagnated in wealth or even fallen down the economic ladder, with almost one in five children now living below the poverty line in the U. A good time to have done something more dramatic and helpful was lost to politics during the Great Recession, which began with the financial crisis of President Trump campaigned on the promise of large-scale infrastructure projects.
Bilstein, Roger E. New York, Childs, William R. Hines, Lawrence G. Kouwenhoven, John. Mettler, Suzanne. Soldiers to Citizens: The G. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation Hounshell, David A.
McCraw, Thomas K. Rose, Mark H. It focuses on the entrepreneur, the firm, and the industry, by showing—from the inside—how businesses operated after , while offering a good deal of Modern American social and cultural history. The case studies and contextual chapters provide an in-depth understanding of the evolution of American management over nearly years.
American Business Since How It Worked presents historical struggles with decision making and the trend towards relative decentralization through stories of extraordinarily capable entrepreneurs and the organizations they led. It also delves into such modern success stories as Amazon.
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