Describing the men who have led the U.S. Treasury since its creation in 1789, this book profiles those who have held the cabinet position of Secretary of the Treasury from Alexander Hamilton to Robert Rubin. Each profile provides the reader with an understanding of the man, the problems he faced, and the contributions he made. While focusing on the economic policy problems of an era and the solutions the secretary offered, each profile also includes a vignette illustrating the secretary's personality and background. Some represent backgrounds of money and power, others backgrounds of simplicity and anonymity. Some came to the office with greater stature than when they left, while others made a significant mark on our nation's financial history. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, besides collecting and dispersing the public revenue, made the Treasury a prime agency for promoting the country's economic development and fiscal soundness. Since the Great Depression, the Treasury's regulatory functions have been articulated and elaborated. Working with the President's cabinet and with maximum statistical data, the secretaries have sought to analyze the economic outlook and to coordinate official actions, including policies to maintain a strong and stable U.S. dollar. The essays in this book, written by 24 authorities, illustrate how the Secretary of the Treasury is responsible for formulating and recommending domestic and international financial, economic, and tax policy, participating in the formulation of broad fiscal policies with general significance for the economy, and managing the public debt. The biographies illustrate continuing themes of fiscal management as our nation evolved over 200 stormy years of history. They also provide an intimate look at 69 individual secretaries, with stories and facts about their leadership, ideas, style, and administrative prowess, together with their personality and family lives.

A thoroughly revised and updated new edition of the world's leading comprehensive bibliography of American and international politics. The eagerly anticipated new edition of the widely acclaimed Information Sources of Political Science is the most comprehensive English-language political bibliography available, offering the surest way for students and researchers to get straight to the information they need. Like no other volume, it provides a fully rounded view of the field both in the United States and internationally, including relevant works in history, economics, sociology, and education. Its 2,500 entries cover a wide variety of source types: indexing and abstracting services, major bibliographical tools, encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, directories, statistical compilations, and more. In addition, this edition is the first to feature substantial coverage of electronic resources, both databases and Internet sites. Each source receives its own annotation, with entries grouped in categories to bring together like works for easy comparison. This work is a cornerstone reference for academic and public libraries.

Left-leaning political parties play an important role as representatives of the poor and disempowered. They once did so by promising protections from the forces of capital and the market’s tendencies to produce inequality. But in the 1990s they gave up on protection, asking voters to adapt to a market-driven world. Meanwhile, new, extreme parties began to promise economic protections of their own—albeit in an angry, anti-immigrant tone. To better understand today’s strange new political world, Stephanie L. Mudge’s Leftism Reinvented analyzes the history of the Swedish and German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. Breaking with an assumption that parties simply respond to forces beyond their control, Mudge argues that left parties’ changing promises expressed the worldviews of different kinds of experts. To understand how left parties speak, we have to understand the people who speak for them. Leftism Reinvented shows how Keynesian economists came to speak for left parties by the early 1960s. These economists saw their task in terms of discretionary, politically-sensitive economic management. But in the 1980s a new kind of economist, who viewed the advancement of markets as left parties’ main task, came to the fore. Meanwhile, as voters’ loyalties to left parties waned, professional strategists were called upon to “spin” party messages. Ultimately, left parties undermined themselves, leaving a representative vacuum in their wake. Leftism Reinvented raises new questions about the roles and responsibilities of left parties—and their experts—in politics today.

This A–Z encyclopedia provides carefully selected entries covering the people, events, and concepts relevant to Andrew Johnson's life. Andrew Johnson was—and is—an American paradox. He never attended school, yet fought for public education. He was a Southern slaveholder who opposed secession and enforced emancipation. Born into poverty, he became the 17th president of the United States—and the first U.S. president to be impeached. This new volume thoroughly examines the troubled career of our most unpopular president—not to resuscitate his reputation, but because his personal contradictions reflected those of his country: a democratic nation conceived in liberty, yet existing half slave and half free; an economy of yeoman farmers and independent artisans being swept into industrialization and a market system; a country fond of tradition, but caught up in social, economic, and political revolution.

This book is the third installment in a series of volumes looking at episodes in American economic history from a public choice perspective. Each chapter discusses citizens, special interests, and government officials responding to economic incentives in both markets and politics. In doing so, the book provides fresh insights into important periods of American history, from the Rhode Island’s 1788 Referendum on the U.S. Constitution and the political influence of women’s clubs in the United States. The volume features economic historians such as Ruth Wallis Herndon, junior public choice scholars such as Jayme Lemke and Leo Krasnozhon, and political scientists such as Michael Faber. This volume will be useful for researchers and students interested in economics, history, political science, economic history, public choice, and political economy.

A definitive new biography of James Fenimore Cooper, early nineteenth century master of American popular fiction American author James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) has been credited with inventing and popularizing a wide variety of genre fiction, including the Western, the spy novel, the high seas adventure tale, and the Revolutionary War romance. America’s first crusading novelist, Cooper reminds us that literature is not a cloistered art; rather, it ought to be intimately engaged with the world. In this second volume of his definitive biography, Wayne Franklin concentrates on the latter half of Cooper’s life, detailing a period of personal and political controversy, far-ranging international travel, and prolific literary creation. We hear of Cooper’s progressive views on race and slavery, his doubts about American expansionism, and his concern about the future prospects of the American Republic, while observing how his groundbreaking career management paved the way for later novelists to make a living through their writing. Franklin offers readers the most comprehensive portrait to date of this underappreciated American literary icon.

This sweeping reference work covers every aspect of the Cold War, from its ignition in the ashes of World War II, through the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War superpower face-off between the Soviet Union and the United States dominated international affairs in the second half of the 20th century and still reverberates around the world today. This comprehensive and insightful multivolume set provides authoritative entries on all aspects of this world-changing event, including wars, new military technologies, diplomatic initiatives, espionage activities, important individuals and organizations, economic developments, societal and cultural events, and more. This expansive coverage provides readers with the necessary context to understand the many facets of this complex conflict. The work begins with a preface and introduction and then offers illuminating introductory essays on the origins and course of the Cold War, which are followed by some 1,500 entries on key individuals, wars, battles, weapons systems, diplomacy, politics, economics, and art and culture. Each entry has cross-references and a list of books for further reading. The text includes more than 100 key primary source documents, a detailed chronology, a glossary, and a selective bibliography. Numerous illustrations and maps are inset throughout to provide additional context to the material.

Drawing on revealing new research, this richly informative volume is the definitive concise introduction to the crisis that took the world to the brink of nuclear war. Cuban Missile Crisis: The Essential Reference Guide captures the historical context, the minute-by-minute drama, and the profound repercussions of the "Missiles of October" confrontation that brought the very real threat of nuclear attack to the United States' doorstep. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the crisis, it takes full advantage of recently opened Soviet archives as well as interviews with key Russian, Cuban, and U.S. officials to explore the event as it played out in Moscow, Havana, Washington, and other locations around the world. Cuban Missile Crisis contains an introductory essay by the author and alphabetically organized reference entries contributed by leading Cold War researchers. The book also includes an exceptionally comprehensive bibliography. Together, these resources give readers everything they need to understand the escalating tensions that led to the crisis as well as the intense diplomacy that resolved it, including new information about the back-channel negotiations between Robert Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

Contains approximately 20,000 mostly English language sources for academic libraries of all sizes.