Ever since Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means wrote their classic 1932 analysis of the American corporation, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, social scientists have been intrigued and challenged by the evolution of this crucial part of American social and economic life. Here William Roy conducts a historical inquiry into the rise of the large publicly traded American corporation. Departing from the received wisdom, which sees the big, vertically integrated corporation as the result of technological development and market growth that required greater efficiency in larger scale firms, Roy focuses on political, social, and institutional processes governed by the dynamics of power. The author shows how the corporation started as a quasi-public device used by governments to create and administer public services like turnpikes and canals and then how it germinated within a system of stock markets, brokerage houses, and investment banks into a mechanism for the organization of railroads. Finally, and most particularly, he analyzes its flowering into the realm of manufacturing, when at the turn of this century, many of the same giants that still dominate the American economic landscape were created. Thus, the corporation altered manufacturing entities so that they were each owned by many people instead of by single individuals as had previously been the case.

Winner of the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal for US History From the acclaimed author of 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents and 1960: LJB vs JFK vs Nixon—The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies comes a dazzling panorama of presidential and political personalities, ambitions, plots, and counterplots; racism, anti-Semitism, anti-socialism, and anti-communism, and the landslide referendum on FDR’s New Deal policies in the 1936 presidential election. Award-winning historian David Pietrusza boldly steers clear of the pat narrative regarding Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented 1936 re-election landslide, weaving an enormously more intricate, ever more surprising tale of a polarized nation; of America’s most complex, calculating, and politically successful president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the very top of his Machiavellian game; and the unlocking of the puzzle of how our society, our politics, and our parties fitfully reinvented themselves. With in-depth examinations of rabble-rousing Democratic US Senator Huey Long and his assassination before he was able to challenge FDR in ’36; powerful, but widely hated, newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who blasted FDR’s “Raw Deal”; wildly popular, radical radio commentator Father Coughlin; the steamrolled passage of Social Security and backlash against it; the era’s racism and anti-Semitism; American Socialism and Communism; and a Supreme Court seemingly bent on dismantling the New Deal altogether, Roosevelt Sweeps Nation is a vivid portrait of a dynamic Depression-Era America. Crafting his account from an impressive and unprecedented collection of primary and secondary sources, Pietrusza has produced an engrossing, original, and authoritative account of an election, a president, and a nation at the crossroads. The nation’s stakes were high . . . and the parallels hauntingly akin to today’s dangerously strife-ridden political and culture wars.

In 1939 Frank Luther Mott received a Pulitzer Prize for Volumes II and III of his History of American Magazines. In 1958 he was awarded the Bancroft Prize for Volume IV. He was at work on Volume V of the projected six-volume history when he died in October 1964. He had, at that time, written the sketches of the twenty-one magazines that appear in this volume. These magazines flourished during the period 1905-1930, but their "biographies" are continued throughout their entire lifespan--in the case of the ten still published, to recent years. Mott's daughter, Mildred Mott Wedel, has prepared this volume for publication and provided notes on changes since her father's death. No one has attempted to write the general historical chapters the author provided in the earlier volumes but which were not yet written for this last volume. A delightful autobiographical essay by the author has been included, and there is a detailed cumulative index to the entire set of this monumental work. The period 1905-1930 witnessed the most flamboyant and fruitful literary activity that had yet occurred in America. In his sketches, Mott traces the editorial partnership of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, first on The Smart Set and then in the pages of The American Mercury. He treats The New Republic, the liberal magazine founded in 1914 by Herbert Croly and Willard Straight; the conservative Freeman; and Better Homes and Gardens, the first magazine to achieve a circulation of one million "without the aid of fiction or fashions." Other giants of magazine history are here: we see "serious, shaggy...solid, pragmatic, self-contained" Henry Luce propel a national magazine called Time toward its remarkable prosperity. In addition to those already mentioned, the reader will find accounts of The Midland, The South Atlantic Quarterly, The Little Review, Poetry, The Fugitive, Everybody's, Appleton's Booklovers Magazine, Current History, Editor & Publisher, The Golden Book Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Hampton's Broadway Magazine, House Beautiful, Success, and The Yale Review.

Black, Henry Campbell. A Law Dictionary. Containing Definitions of the Terms and Phrases of American and English Jurisprudence, Ancient and Modern. And Including the Principal Terms of International, Constitutional, Ecclesiastical and Commercial Law, and Medical Jurisprudence, with a Collection of Legal Maxims, Numerous Select Titles from the Roman, Modern Civil, Scotch, French, Spanish, and Mexican Law, and Other Foreign Systems, and a Table of Abbreviations. St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing, 1910. 1314 pp. Reprinted 1995 by the Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 97-10320. ISBN 1-886363-10-2. Cloth. $195. * The second edition of Black's classic dictionary incorporates many new definitions and additional citations to decided cases, besides being a thorough revision of previous entries. Also included are many Latin and French terms overlooked in the first edition. Medical jurisprudence in particular is enriched, with new definitions for insanity and pathological and criminal insanity. The second edition (1910) is an essential complement to the first edition (1891) as it provides the scholar and student of law important insights into the rapid development of law at the turn of the century. The second edition is also notable for its revamped system of arrangement, with all compound and descriptive terms subsumed under their related main entries. Libraries, students, historians, and practitioners will all benefit from this historically significant research tool.

Vols. 65-96 include "Central law journal's international law list."

A major revision of the history of labor law in the United States in the early twentieth century, "Lawyers against Labor" goes beyond legal issues to consider cultural, political, and industrial history as well. In the first full treatment of the turn-of-the-century American Anti-Boycott Association(AABA), Daniel Ernst ably leads the reader through a compelling story of business and politics. The AABA was an organization of small- to medium-sized employers whose staff litigated and lobbied against organized labor. Ernst captures in depth the characters involved, bringing them to life with a writer's eye and a touch of wit. As he examines the AABA at work to combat trade unions through the courts, he introduces its most notable leaders, Daniel Davenport and Walter Gordon Merritt - who personified the opposing points of view - and shows how pluralism had won itself a place in the legal, academic, political, corporate, and even trade-union worlds long before the New Deal.