Books in the series American Business, Politics, and Society explore the relationships over time between politics, society, and the creation and performance of markets, firms, and industries large and small. The central theme of this series is that culture, law, and public policy have been fundamental to the evolution of American business from the colonial era to the present. The series aims to explore, in particular, developments that have enduring consequences.
Series Editors: Andrew Wender Cohen Professor of History, Syracuse University
Shane Hamilton Reader in Strategy, Management and Society University of York
Kim Phillips-Fein Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History Columbia University
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Professor of History Loyola University Chicago
Staff Editorial Contact: Robert Lockhart, Senior Editor rlockhar@upenn.edu
Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit
Kendra D. Boyd
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 9781512827422
Pub Date: April 2025
Format: Hardcover
360 Pages
Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners’ journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, and from their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s.
Crusading for Globalization tells the story of an extraordinarily influential group of business executives at the helms of the largest US multinational corporations and their quest to drive globalization forward over the last eight decades, revealing the historical roots of today’s disparities in wealth and income distribution.
Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America
Jennifer M. Black
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9781512825008
Pub Date: December 2023
Format: Hardcover
320 Pages
After 1830, printers, entrepreneurs, and admen devised visual and textual strategies that would appeal to consumers, gain their trust, and solidify brand identity. Jennifer M. Black argues this visual language of trust—symbolized in the trademark—grew out of middle-class ideas and has come to define both American consumer culture and trademark law.
Collecting new scholarship at the intersection of the fields of military history, business history, policy history, and the history of capitalism, The Military and the Market covers two centuries of history of the U.S. military’s vast and varied economic operations, including its often tense relationships with capitalist markets.
The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship
Brenna Wynn Greer
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 9780812225013
Pub Date: October 2021
Format: Paperback
361 Pages
Focusing on advertising and public relations guru Moss Kendrix, Ebony publisher John H. Johnson, and Life photographer Gordon Parks, Brenna Wynn Greer chronicles how black capitalists made the market work for racial progress on their way to making money.
In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how Americans accumulated and wielded monetary information in order to navigate the early republic's chaotic bank note system. He demonstrates that the shift to federally authorized paper money in the Civil War era eliminated the public's need for detailed financial knowledge.
Offering a groundbreaking account of the inner workings of the "arsenal of democracy," Destructive Creation suggests how the struggle to define its heroes and villains has continued to shape economic and political development to the present day.
The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store
Vicki Howard
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 9780812224399
Pub Date: March 2019
Format: Paperback
304 Pages
Richly illustrated with archival photos, this comprehensive study of the American department store industry traces the changing economic and political contexts that brought about the decline of downtown shopping districts and the rise of big-box stores and suburban malls.
Health Care and Economic Transformation in Pittsburgh and Houston
Andrew T. Simpson
Price: $54.95
ISBN: 9780812251678
Pub Date: November 2019
Format: Hardcover
288 Pages
The Medical Metropolis offers the first comparative, historical account of how big medicine shaped American cities in the postindustrial era. Taking Pittsburgh and Houston as case studies, Andrew T. Simpson traces the effects the changing business of American health care had on policy, privatization, and technological innovation.
The Postindustrial Transformation of North America
Tracy Neumann
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9780812224382
Pub Date: March 2019
Format: Paperback
280 Pages
Remaking the Rust Belt tells the story of how local leaders throughout the Rust Belt adapted internationally circulating ideas about postindustrial redevelopment to create the jobs and amenities they believed would attract middle-class professionals, but in so doing widened and deepened economic inequality among urban residents.
