Environmental history could be approached using the mental models of economists. The six essays in this volume eschew a disciplinary for an interdisciplinary approach and an ambition “to construct a comprehensive history of interaction between nature and culture” (p. 147).

This is the third volume of the California History Sesquicentennial Series from the University of California Press. The present volume contains 12 essays on social history, and is handsomely illustrated with original photos and artwork, including 16 color plates of California art from the first decades of the American period. Each essay covers a particular topic, such as education, migration, urbanization, popular culture, the status of women, and more. The overarching theme of the book is that the Gold Rush caused a period of barbarism in California society and culture characterized by racism, violence, and drunkenness, but as the seeds of civilization slowly took root, a relatively “normal” society emerged. One irony of this theme is that it undergirds the postmodern sensibilities of several essays that attempt to uncover the hidden narratives of women, minorities, and sexual desire.

This is a book that deserves a wider readership than its title might suggest. More than a narrow history concerning health and pension benefits received by one union, it touches on nearly every issue that has been raised concerning health care and social-security reform. Richard Mulcahy accomplishes this feat through a clearly written narrative history that seldom strays from its basic story line. The story involves the founding, development and demise of medical coverage provided by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) Welfare and Retirement Fund. Furthermore Mulcahy provides what might be called a revisionist historical assessment of John L. Lewis, president of the UMWA; specifically that his regime might not have been the “Corrupt Kingdom” described by William Finley (The Corrupt Kingdom. The Rise and Fall of the United Mine Workers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972).

This is a colossal volume—it is at once a compendium, a survey, a critical evaluation, and a clear exposition of a burgeoning field. It is a study of macroeconomic policy-making in the presence of heterogeneity across actors. Allan Drazen argues that the sine qua non of politics is the conflict of interests; and the core of political economy is that policies are the outcome of the interaction of competing individuals and groups whose concern is their own welfare and not necessarily that of any other individuals or the society as a whole.

In this study of the economic rhetoric of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, 1929–1933, Davis Houck tries boldly to link the fields of rhetoric, history, and economics. He claims to “have established the crucial relationship between rhetoric and economics. Specifically, economic recovery is premised, in part, on collective confidence, which, in turn, is influenced by both presidential speech and cooperative legislative action” (p. 199).

There is no hoarier chestnut of financial history than the Tulip Mania, and hard on its heels are the stories of the infamous South Sea Bubble and the contemporaneous financial scheme of John Law. The first of these is part of the historical lexicon even of captains of industry and journalists, and has endured endless repetition, the tale usually based on Charles Mackay's highly embellished 1841 retelling (Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. London: R. Bentley). The speculative bubbles of 1720 are more complex and better researched phenomena, which accounts, perhaps, for their less frequent invocations by laymen. Scholars, on the other hand, do not hesitate to misinterpret these events.

A House Dividing serves as much-appreciated example of how narrative political economy remains a persuasive format for historical research. John Majewski addresses the topic of divergence in economic development between antebellum North and South by looking inside the highly political process of infrastructure development. Using case studies of Albemarle County, Virginia, and Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Majewski shows how competition between rival small cities left Virginia without a coherent growth strategy. In marked contrast, eventual domination of Pennsylvania internal improvements by business interests in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh focused development efforts there.

Ben S. Bernanke's Essays on the Great Depression make satisfying reading. Spanning microeconomic foundations and macroeconomic outcomes, the book pulls together articles containing some of the best and most conclusive research on the economic catastrophe of the 1930s. Bernanke's work, with co-authors Harold James, Ilian Mihov, James L. Powell, Martin Parkinson, and Kevin Carey, tackles key questions head-on; here the reader will find lucid treatment of the role played in the crisis by worldwide operation of the gold standard, as well as dissection of key developments in interwar labor-market institutions. The work is on the methodological forefront, with a number of careful comparative analyses across nations and industries.

The basic problem with writing a history of American Big Business is finding some method to organize the familiar chronicles of companies and people as well as the usual stories of good and evil into some coherent book of reasonable length. The organizing method adopted by Charles Geisst is to focus on the popular reaction to “monopolies,” more accurately, private concentrations of economic power. For the most part, this method succeeds, assisted in no small part by Geisst's smooth style and cynical, perhaps jaded, attitude.

The dust-jacket blurbs use “stunning,” “eloquent,” “wholly original,” and “first-rate” to describe the author and this work, and the praise is apt. Mike Davis examines the relationships among (a) late-nineteenth-century famines in much of what we now call the “Third World,” (b) the climatic effect known as ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation), (c) Western imperialism, and (d) the twentieth-century gap between the wealthiest and poorest countries in the world. Davis teases out the causal linkages among them, painting a new picture of the elements that went into “the making of the Third World.” His thesis is that the late-nineteenth-century globe-spanning droughts in India, China, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia were precipitated by El Niño, but they became massive famines—killing 30 to 50 million people—because of a London-centered international capitalism. The famines in turn provided imperialists with an opportunity for further territorial aggrandizement. The Third World thus resulted from a conjuncture of natural, political, and socioeconomic processes.

Some economists are confident that they understand labor unions. Viewing unions as monopolies, they believe unions raise their members' wages by reducing labor supply to unionized trades. In this monopoly-union view, nonmembers pay for union wage gains through higher prices for union-made goods and lower wages for nonunion workers due to crowding into nonunion industries and trades. By tampering with the free-market distribution of labor, unions distort the fair distribution of wages and income and lower output by pushing workers from more- into less-efficient occupations.

This book is the third volume (of a proposed four) in the Russell Sage Foundation's Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality. The paradox mentioned in the title refers to Atlanta's seemingly contradictory position as both a symbol of Sunbelt South racial and economic progress and a pit of persistent poverty. Yet for all the apparent progress of the post–World War II years, Atlanta in the 1990s remained a highly segregated city and its poverty rate ranked as the fifth highest in the nation. This is “the Atlanta paradox” that the authors set out to try and explain. The chief sources of data for this book, as with other volumes in the series, are household and employers surveys conducted between 1992 and 1994 as part of the Multi-City Study. A useful appendix summarizes the survey methodology (pp. 9–12). The surveys themselves will surely become a useful resource for other scholars.

This book is ahead of its time. While the title suggests that Finding Jobs might be a study of the labor market impacts of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the editors and authors make clear that it is simply too early to study these effects directly. Rather, their purpose is to examine the characteristics of low-wage, low-skill labor markets, along with the effects of policies directed at these labor markets, relying on data from the pre-PRWORA era. Their hope is that this analysis will clarify the questions that we will need to ask as the effects of welfare reform become more pronounced. While the chapters are of varying quality, the book as a whole accomplishes this goal.

Jonathan Bean's book chronicles the growth and development of the Small Business Administration (SBA) from its inception in 1953 through the present. In addition to placing the SBA's actions in the context of changing political environments, the book focuses on three separate issues, though it is not organized this way. The first two are different types of affirmative action: preferences and subsidies for “small” firms, and preferences for people who have been “economically disadvantaged.” Finally, it chronicles the history of scandal and corruption that has plagued the SBA.

This is a book about bilateral bargaining between countries over economic issues such as trade and finance. As such it is of great interest to economic historians, who often need to understand why countries entered into specific treaties or established certain relations with other countries. However, in some respects it is an uncomfortable book for economists. This is so because the book is written from the point of view of the discipline of International Relations, which, unlike economics, does not have a well-developed theory. The author recognizes this and his objective in the book is precisely to take some first steps towards developing “…a better grounded and more useful theory” (p. 17). He is not after something similar to game theory or other formal models that economists have already developed. He reviews this literature, and although he recognizes its many strengths, he has strong reservations about the rationality assumption and the many simplifications that are necessary to make the models tractable. Under such circumstances it turns out that outcomes are determined by background conditions, that is, the parameters of the model, and therefore negotiation ends up having no role. That is, whichever economic diplomat a country sends to negotiate a treaty would reach the same end result.

For years to come historians of economic thought, economic historians, and, most importantly, Adam Smith scholars will all be indebted to Professor Cheng-chung Lai for this unique contribution to our collective understanding of the spread of economic ideas. In the volume under review, Lai has assembled a very compelling set of writings that advance our understanding of the spread of Smith's ideas beyond the Anglophone world. This volume includes a variety of sources, some translated specifically for it, including original prefaces or forwards to several translations, a few now-classic essays on the spread of Smithian ideas, and a number of articles by contemporary Smith scholars. Collectively, these 29 essays provide a remarkable insight into the reception accorded Smith's ideas in ten nations.

During the late 1980s the United States experienced a major wave of corporate leveraging as firms substituted debt for equity. The boom peaked in 1989, after which the junk bond market collapsed, bank credit tightened, and leveraged buyouts (LBOs) dropped off sharply. Beginning in 1991, the favorable stock market helped firms that had been taken private with largely borrowed money to survive by issuing public equity. As the economy recovered from recession, mergers and acquisitions resumed the acceleration that had begun in the 1980s. Corporate restructuring often occurred without much leveraging, however, and in the more friendly deals of the 1990s CEOs were likely to be in control.

Economic development is for many communities and policy makers a familiar and worthy goal, but sadly, it can also be an elusive goal. Familiar, because the standard by which many policy makers and their advisors are evaluated is their ability to attract industries and firms, to create jobs, and otherwise to expand the capacity and economic base of a community. Elusive, because not only are no two communities identical, but also because the outcomes of specific policies and actions can be difficult to predict with certainty. The collected case studies in this book offer more than 30 examples of programs and policies enacted in the pursuit of economic progress across various small towns and rural communities.

Over the years, land use has been the focus of much attention by students of the American West. A recurring theme in a large number of scholarly studies has been a marked tension, in many contexts, between private land use and the so-called common good. Private land use practices, which include water use, mining, grazing, and timber cutting, often appear to militate against the common good, loosely defined as the best interests of society at large. This has led to numerous calls for regulation or planning efforts in order to promote the common good, often in the face of fierce resistance from private land owners and proponents of smaller government. Such real-world conflicts have spurred considerable debate among economists regarding the relative virtues of largely free-market solutions versus some form of government policy. In recent years, as population growth in the West and environmental advocacy in general have both boomed, so have the frequency and sheer economic magnitude of land-use conflicts. Consequently, the rift between the governmental and free-market positions relating to land use in the West has widened into a full-fledged gulf.

Contrary to what its title suggests, this book is not a history of clock design, manufacture, or marketing. It is instead about the rise and fall of commercial time signal distribution by astronomical observatories in the nineteenth-century United States—time-telling rather than timekeeping. It narrates complex interactions of scientific, business, and governmental establishments around the activity of telling any buyer of the service, and therefore also the public at large, what time it was, accurately and consistently. It also discusses the adoption, late in the century, of American standard time zones and the eventual international agreement to accept the location of Greenwich in England as 0°, the prime meridian from which other meridians were calibrated.