Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Nowhere in the world is there a greater concentration of significant skyscrapers than in New York City. And though this iconographic American building style has roots in Chicago, New York is where it has grown into such a powerful reflection of American commerce and culture. In Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century, Benjamin Flowers explores the role of culture and ideology in shaping the construction of skyscrapers and the way wealth and power have operated to reshape the urban landscape. Flowers narrates this modern tale by closely examining the creation and reception of three significant sites: the Empire State Building, the Seagram Building, and the World Trade Center. He demonstrates how architects and their clients employed a diverse range of modernist styles to engage with and influence broader cultural themes in American society: immigration, the Cold War, and the rise of American global capitalism. Skyscraper explores the various wider meanings associated with this architectural form as well as contemporary reactions to it across the critical spectrum. Employing a broad array of archival sources, such as corporate records, architects' papers, newspaper ads, and political cartoons, Flowers examines the personal, political, cultural, and economic agendas that motivate architects and their clients to build ever higher. He depicts the American saga of commerce, wealth, and power in the twentieth century through their most visible symbol, the skyscraper.

Elliot Rosen's Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust focused on the transition from the Hoover administration to that of Roosevelt and the formulation of the early New Deal program. Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery emphasized long-term and structural recovery programs as well as the 1937–38 recession. Rosen’s final book in the trilogy, The Republican Party in the Age of Roosevelt, situates distrust of the federal government and the consequent transformation of the party. Domestic and foreign policies introduced by the Roosevelt administration created division between the parties. The Hoover doctrine, which sought to restrict the reach of independent agencies at the federal level in order to restore business confidence and investment, intended to reverse the New Deal and to curb the growth of federal functions. In his new book, Elliot Rosen holds that economic thought regarding appropriate functions of the federal government has not changed since the Great Depression. The political debate is still being waged between advocates for direct intervention at the federal level and those for the Hoover ethic with its stress on individual responsibility. The question remains whether preservation of an unfettered marketplace and our liberties remain inseparable or whether enlarged governmental functions are required in an increasingly complex national and global environment. By offering a well-researched account of the antistatist and nationalist origins not only of the debate over legitimate federal functions but also of the modern Republican Party, this book affords insight into such contemporary political movements as the Tea Party.

The du Ponts, one of the most powerful families in American industry, actively fought policies that gave government more power over the economy. By focusing on one family's contribution to the economic and political debate between the world wars, Burk casts light on the changing fortunes of business and government in twentieth-century America.

This book is the tale not just of the two extraordinary men of its title but also of the formative decades of twentieth-century America, through two world wars and changes in business, industry, politics, and culture. You couldn’t find two more different men. Billy Durant was the consummate salesman, a brilliant wheeler-dealer with grand plans, unflappable energy, and a fondness for the high life. Alfred Sloan was the intellectual, an expert in business strategy and management, master of all things organizational. Together, this odd couple built perhaps the most successful enterprise in U.S. history, General Motors, and with it an industry that has come to define modern life throughout the world. In Billy, Alfred, and General Motors, business leaders and history buffs alike will discover: timeless lessons, cautionary tales, and motivational inspiration. The book includes vivid, warts-and-all portraits of the legends of the golden age of the automobile, from Henry Ford, Ransom Olds, and Charles Nash to the brilliant but uncredited David Dunbar Buick and Cadillac founder Henry Leland. The impact of Durant and Sloan on their contemporaries and their industry is matched only by the powerful legacy of their improbable and incredible partnership. Characters, events, and context -- all are brought skillfully and passionately to life in this meticulously researched and supremely readable book.

This book examines the changes in General Motors' organization between 1924 and 1970.

In the space of about thirty years – from 1964 to 1994 – American corporations abandoned racially exclusionary employment policies and embraced some form of affirmative action to diversify their workforces. It was an extraordinary transformation, which most historians attribute to civil rights activists, federal legislation, and labor unions. This is the first book to examine the role of corporations in that transformation. Whereas others emphasize corporate obstruction, this book argues that there were corporate executives and managers who promoted fair employment and equal employment opportunity long before the federal government required it, and who thereby helped prepare the corporate world for racial integration. The book examines the pioneering corporations that experimented with integration in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as corporate responses to the civil rights movement and urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s and the widespread adoption of affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s.