American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War

American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War

Author: Robert E. Gallman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0226279472

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This benchmark volume addresses the debate over the effects of early industrialization on standards of living during the decades before the Civil War. Its contributors demonstrate that the aggregate antebellum economy was growing faster than any other large economy had grown before. Despite the dramatic economic growth and rise in income levels, questions remain as to the general quality of life during this era. Was the improvement in income widely shared? How did economic growth affect the nature of work? Did higher levels of income lead to improved health and longevity? The authors address these questions by analyzing new estimates of labor force participation, real wages, and productivity, as well as of the distribution of income, height, and nutrition.


U.S. History

U.S. History

Author: P. Scott Corbett

Publisher:

Published: 2024-09-10

Total Pages: 1886

ISBN-13:

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U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.


Land of Promise

Land of Promise

Author: Michael Lind

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2012-04-17

Total Pages: 554

ISBN-13: 0062097725

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"[An] ambitious economic history of the united States...rich with details." ?—David Leonhardt, New York Times Book Review How did a weak collection of former British colonies become an industrial, financial, and military colossus? From the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the American economy has been transformed by wave after wave of emerging technology: the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, computer technology. Yet technology-driven change leads to growing misalignment between an innovative economy and anachronistic legal and political structures until the gap is closed by the modernization of America's institutions—often amid upheavals such as the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Great Depression and World War II. When the U.S. economy has flourished, government and business, labor and universities, have worked together in a never-ending project of economic nation building. As the United States struggles to emerge from the Great Recession, Michael Lind clearly demonstrates that Americans, since the earliest days of the republic, have reinvented the American economy - and have the power to do so again.


The Roots of American Industrialization

The Roots of American Industrialization

Author: David R. Meyer

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2003-05-21

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780801871412

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Farms that were on poor soil and distant from markets declined, whereas other farms successfully adjusted production as rural and urban markets expanded and as Midwestern agricultural products flowed eastward after 1840. Rural and urban demand for manufactures in the East supported diverse industrial development and prosperous rural areas and burgeoning cities supplied increasing amounts of capital for investment.


Empire of Cotton

Empire of Cotton

Author: Sven Beckert

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-11-10

Total Pages: 642

ISBN-13: 0375713964

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WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.


Wages and Labor Markets in the United States, 1820-1860

Wages and Labor Markets in the United States, 1820-1860

Author: Robert A. Margo

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-02-15

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0226505022

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Research by economists and economic historians has greatly expanded our knowledge of labor markets and real wages in the United States since the Civil War, but the period from 1820 to 1860 has been far less studied. Robert Margo fills this gap by collecting and analyzing the payroll records of civilians hired by the United States Army and the 1850 and 1860 manuscript federal Censuses of Social Statistics. New wage series are constructed for three occupational groups—common laborers, artisans, and white-collar workers—in each of the four major census regions—Northeast, Midwest, South Atlantic, and South Central—over the period 1820 to 1860, and also for California between 1847 and 1860. Margo uses these data, along with previously collected evidence on prices, to explore a variety of issues central to antebellum economic development. This volume makes a significant contribution to economic history by presenting a vast amount of previously unexamined data to advance the understanding of the history of wages and labor markets in the antebellum economy.


A House Dividing

A House Dividing

Author: John Majewski

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-06-19

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780521590235

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Comparing Virginia and Pennsylvania, Majewski explains how slavery undermined the development of the southern economy.