The President and American Capitalism since 1945

This excellent collection joins the growing body of literature on the interaction of the U.S. political and economic spheres. Much of the work on the history of capitalism has been focused on the nineteenth century, especially the histories of slavery and finance in that period. In a sense, it has been primarily concerned with the forces that brought capitalism into being, on the creation of markets in people, land, and money. The question of what it means to write the history of capitalism in the twentieth century—to write about the development of an economy already dominated by capitalist institutions and practices—is one that historians are still negotiating. The sixteen thought-provoking essays collected by Mark H. Rose and Roger Biles offer much insight into the varied ways that scholars are approaching this issue. These clusters (which grew out of papers presented at a 2016 conference at Florida Atlantic University) cover an array of topics: from student debt to the “glass ceiling” in women's employment; from presidential rhetoric regarding consumption, credit cards, and capitalism to federal social programs in the 1970s; from the privatization of the military to the role of the federal government in the development of computer technology. Most are focused on the years between 1945 and 1980, although some start in the 1920s and others go into the 1990s and beyond. Taken together, the essays allude to the importance of thinking about the role of government in shaping economic life over these years in myriad ways. (Unfortunately, none of the essays addresses the president and organized labor, or welfare policy

Capitalism · Consumption (sociology · Debt · Economic history · Economics · Government (linguistics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Presidential system · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · Finance · History · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US