How America can rebuild its industrial landscape to sustain an innovative economy. America is the world leader in innovation, but many of the innovative ideas that are hatched in American start-ups, labs, and companies end up going abroad to reach commercial scale. Apple, the superstar of innovation, locates its production in China (yet still reaps most of its profits in the United States). When innovation does not find the capital, skills, and expertise it needs to come to market in the United States, what does it mean for economic growth and job creation? Inspired by the MIT Made in America project of the 1980s, Making in America brings experts from across MIT to focus on a critical problem for the country. MIT scientists, engineers, social scientists, and management experts visited more than 250 firms in the United States, Germany, and China. In companies across America—from big defense contractors to small machine shops and new technology start-ups—these experts tried to learn how we can rebuild the industrial landscape to sustain an innovative economy. At each stop, they asked this basic question: “When you have a new idea, how do you get it into the market?” They found gaping holes and missing pieces in the industrial ecosystem. Even in an Internet-connected world, proximity to innovation and users matters for industry. Making in America describes ways to strengthen this connection, including public-private collaborations, new government-initiated manufacturing innovation institutes, and industry/community college projects. If we can learn from these ongoing experiments in linking innovation to production, American manufacturing could have a renaissance.

Enhanced by photographs, reproductions, and sidebars, a survey of the role of women in American history covers such areas as health, work, education, amusements, the arts, work, and beauty.

The America that Alexander Hamilton knew was largely agricultural and built on slave labor. He envisioned something else: a multi-racial, urbanized, capitalistic America with a strong central government. He believed that such an America would be a land of opportunity for the poor and the newcomers. But Hamilton’s vision put him at odds with his archrivals who envisioned a pastoral America of small towns, where governments were local, states would control their own destiny, and the federal government would remain small and weak. The disputes that arose during America’s first decades continued through American history to our present day. Over time, because of the systems Hamilton set up and the ideas he left, his vision won out. Here is the story that epitomizes the American dream—a poor immigrant who made good in America. In the end, Hamilton rose from poverty through his intelligence and ability, and did more to shape our country than any of his contemporaries. Related subjects and concepts discussed in the book include: Law and Legal Concepts Due process Bill of Rights Freedom of Speech and the Press Originalism / nonoriginalism (theories of Constitutional interpretation) Government Checks and Balances Democracy Electoral College Republic Financial Concepts Capitalism Credit Inflation Interest Mercantilism Securities: Stocks and Bonds Tariffs Taxes Miscellaneous Demagogues Dueling Pastoralism About the Series The Making of America series traces the constitutional history of the United States through overlapping biographies of American men and women. The debates that raged when our nation was founded have been argued ever since: How should the Constitution be interpreted? What is the meaning, and where are the limits of personal liberty? What is the proper role of the federal government? Who should be included in “we the people”? Each biography in the series tells the story of an American leader who helped shape the United States of today.

Everyone knows you can't build things in America anymore. Everyone, that is, except John D. Bassett III. While one corporation after another exported their manufacturing to high-volume factories in low-wage locations overseas, Bassett's traditional wood bedroom furniture manufacturing company has not only survived, but thrived, making premium products right here in America. When everyone else was rushing for the exits, Bassett bet on the talent, dedication, and uncompromising quality of American workmanship. And he won. In Making It in America, Bassett tells you the secrets that have made Vaughan-Bassett Furniture so successful doing what everyone said couldn't be done. Drawing on rich life experience, including the everyday challenges running a traditional manufacturing company, Bassett constructs a 12-point plan to achieve successful leadership in any business. These steps include: Have a winning attitude, respect your employees, don't panic, reinvest constantly, and make the best of the worst. Bassett's story is about how those values underpinned his personal success and how they can revitalize America itself. In the face of feckless leadership, crumbling infrastructure, and global competition, Bassett's story is a blueprint for how America can revitalize its role as leader of the free world and how your success can be part of it.

More Like Us is a celebration of American openness to immigration and aspiration and a skeptic's tour of the rigidity of Asian societies. Fallows is the author of the highly acclaimed National Defense.

In this groundbreaking new account, historian Gutzman looks beyond Madison's traditional moniker--The Father of the Constitution--to find a more complex and realistic portrait of this influential founding father, who often performed his founding deeds in spite of himself.

"In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as ... historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today"--Jacket.