Fans pick 100 books like The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State 1900-1918

This is a sequel to the author’s famous The Robber Barons. His detailed primary research into campaigns and negotiations between politicians and their backers illuminates many subjects that later historians have too quickly passed over. Because he knew so much about the economy, Josephson also zeros in again and again on the driving forces that later work often dissolves into bromides about “concentrated wealth” and such. Josephson shows you the people and the institutions actually at work.

Readers looking to the past for inspiration about the possibilities of antitrust and progressive movements right now are being served a very weak and distorted account of what the most successful trust busters like Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson were actually trying to do and what they really accomplished. Kolko was a leader in exploiting primary sources that upended traditional accounts of who did what to whom.

So-called “New Brandeis” antitrust champions in particular overlook the realities of trust busting in American history and have much to learn from this masterpiece. 

This work is different from previous books suggested here. It is only recently published, but it presents revised versions of essays that sometimes date back a decade or more. Superbly written with great clarity, its strong points are the detail and care with which it spells out how economic factors are woven into American foreign policy and national security strategies.

The author’s subtle understanding of how nuclear weapons dilemmas, historical choices, industrial structures, and bureaucratic competition combine in actual policymaking puts most literature on international relations to shame. In a multi-polar world that is becoming ever more dangerous and in which the specter of nuclear war is again rising, Kurth’s discussions of imperial overextension, the limits of hegemony by one great power, and related topics are extraordinarily timely. Its accounts of major international crises and national security policy point up the shallowness of most American foreign policy discussions and the… show more.

Younger Americans have no direct experience of the Cold War, McCarthyism, or the nineteen sixties. They rarely hear anyone suggest that the government is properly responsible for maintaining full employment. They also have little idea of what the American establishment was when Pax Americana shaped the world. This study conveys that world very well indeed. It benefits once again from a vast amount of primary research. Its depiction of how banks, lawyers, and American multinationals wielded power at the zenith of the “American Century” has few, if any rivals. It vividly shows how someone very few Americans ever heard of rose to the pinnacle of power, shaping not only the U.S., but western Europe (especially Germany), the Mideast, and many other parts of the world. The writing moves briskly along and is especially good at sketching complex situations that are intrinsically tough to convey concretely.

Novels really are timeless and this one, written almost 100 years ago, gives a portrait of feminism before it was a term. The protagonist Selena has a strong work ethic and doesn’t fear the implications of being a widowed mother of a young son and needing to run a small farm on her own. I loved that she relishes the challenge of her responsibility and thinks outside the box to find a niche market, becoming successful by not succumbing to the expectations of others. She doesn’t feel tamped down by her farming community’s judgments of what she can and cannot accomplish. Reading, and enjoying, a novel published in 1924 reminded me that oldies are quite often the besties.

The Stitchers is the first book in the Fright Watch series and any one of them would be the perfect Halloween read. But let’s be real. Old people are scary.

Quinn knows there’s something off about her neighbors. The Oldies have lived in the neighborhood for as long as anyone can remember, and yet they never seem to get any older. If Quinn’s dad was still alive, she knows they’d be coming up with theories: Are they vampires? Aliens? Who knows! The answer is worse than she imagined. When Quinn sees one of the Oldies jogging, she knows she recognizes that leg…it was her dad’s.

I always loved Rod Sterling at Halloween and The Stitchers has such a great Twilight Zone vibe. It’s perfect for kids who lean towards the science fiction side of spookiness where normal things are just…wrong.

Postman is another of my heroes, not least because – like Perkins – of the quality of his thinking and writing. Again, all his books are a pleasure to read – right back to one I read as a young lecturer in the early 1970s called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The pun in his title is deliberate and speaks to the heart of his argument: that if we do not rediscover a coherent and compelling end – i.e. purpose – for education, it will probably, and deservedly, be the end of education as we know it. Postman explores five possible narratives that could be compelling enough to revive young people’s interest and faith in their school. Again, like Perkins, he does not end by giving us an easy answer, but boy, does he make you think about what might be possible. A true visionary, with his feet firmly on… show more.

I knew this book was going to grab me from the first lines, and it held my attention the whole way, through essays on a singularly hyperbolic experience of being a woman in a body.

There is a frankness here, and a persistent scratching at the surface of her own motivations and complicities, that helped me understand some of my own complicated feelings about attention, and insecurity, and what it means to be a creative. If you’ve ever had an uncomfortable relationship to your own beauty, this book is a floodlight and a microscope for that experience. 

I love this classic because it combines theory and practice in an encouraging and easy to comprehend manner. Used by pre-service and in-service teachers worldwide, it remains a wonderful source of engaging ideas and activities that help people make sense of today’s complex world.

It helped me understand more clearly why we must become global citizens.

Osaka became an industrial giant during the Meiji period, remaining one of the world’s fastest-growing cities throughout the later decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth.  The city outgrew Tokyo in both population and industrial production for a brief period during the 1930s.  This was a time when social displacement, horrendous public health and housing failings, and labor unrest threatened communal wellbeing.  The city responded with some of the most innovative social policies of the era, especially under the leadership of Mayor Seki Hajime.  As Hanes uncovers, Seki used his training as a social economist to promote increased industrial production that simultaneously became people-centered. The result was a modernized Osaka that retained a vibrant social inventiveness in the years leading up to World War II.