In this brief volume Nancy Cohen “offers a new narrative of the origins of modern American liberalism” (p. 4). As this agenda suggests, the book is primarily a history of political thought. Briefly, her argument is that the values and programs of Progressive Era corporate liberalism originated in the debates among two generations of Gilded Age political intellectuals. Men such as Edwin L. Godkin, David A. Wells, and Francis A. Walker represented the first generation in the immediate post–Civil War decades. These were not simply classical liberals but “the pioneering theorists of economic consolidation and the active liberal state” (p. 13). A second generation of liberals emerged around the American Economic Association in the 1880s and was led by economists such as Henry C. Adams, John B. Clark, Richard T. Ely, and Edwin R. A. Seligman. Initially more radical, this group was purged in the 1880s, often with the aid of their older colleagues. Together these two generations “confronted the problem of the relationship between democracy and capitalism” (p. 15), and they provided “ideological legitimization of the novel economic, political and social relationships attendant on the rise of corporate capitalism.”

Race on the Line explores a fascinating topic—the impact that technology has on race and gender relations within a firm. Green ambitiously evaluates the impact of labor-saving technologies on employees within AT&T during the period 1880 to 1980. The topic is explored through a thorough examination of archival material. She demonstrates a strong command of the material and has clearly summarized a massive amount of primary material.

The contribution of the blockade to Union victory during the American Civil War has long been controversial. Among those historians who have questioned the blockade's efficacy are Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, William N. Still Jr., Raimondo Luraghi, Frank Lawrence Owsley, and Stephen R. Wise. They note that, until the war's last year, the blockade remained a leaky sieve and that the agrarian South never lost a major battle for lack of arms and ammunition. The blockade's scholarly advocates, including Edwin B. Coddington, Bern Anderson, and Stanley Lebergott, stress in contrast such indirect impacts as the disruption of internal trade, the over-taxing of southern rail-roads, and the dislocation of the Confederate economy overall.

As its title indicates, American Indian reservations are the subject of this book. In particular, this book deals with issues pertaining to the economic conditions of federally recognized reservations, of which there are 314. It does not address the special circumstances of Alaska Native communities or those of reservations established or recognized only by state governments.

Leon H. Keyserling (1908–1987) participated in almost all of the major macroeconomic debates in the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1970s. From 1933 until 1937 he served as a key aide to Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) and drafted pathbreaking labor and housing legislation. As general counsel of the United States Housing Authority from 1937 to 1945 he played a central role in formulating and implementing New Deal housing policy. Keyserling was a founding member of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) in 1946 and was appointed chairman in 1950. After his term on the CEA ended in 1953, he became a private consultant, wrote frequently for major newspapers and magazines, and testified regularly before Congressional committees.

As more and more historians take the linguistic turn and abandon facts and figures for fashion and fiction, it is more than a little refreshing to encounter the work of someone such as Charles Jacobson. In Ties That Bind, Jacobson explores the history of the economic and political dilemmas surrounding urban public utilities, particularly water, electricity, and cable television. Unlike many historians, Jacobson has actually taken the time to learn, master, and ultimately integrate into his text the relevant economic literature.

Jean Heffer's book is a translation from a French edition published in 1995 in the collection L'Evolution de l'humanité by Editions Albin Michel. The work is a synthesis of United States history in the Pacific.

The author uses the concept of a dynamic frontier moving from the American shores to Asia. Heffer considers the Pacific Ocean, “as it is usually defined by oceanologists, i.e., ending at the Bering Strait in the north and including the seas along the Asian continent in the west, from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Java Sea, and washing the eastern coast of Australia” (p. 5). This choice avoids the customary pitfalls of studies that ignore some of the identifiable regions that form part of the Pacific.

One of the most colorful episodes in American business history is the development of the Texas oil industry. From the 1956 movie Giant to the 1978–1991 television series Dallas the Texas oil boom has fascinated millions of people. Among economic historians and economists, the industry has been the basis for studies of firm behavior, regulation, collective action, and regional economic development.

This book grew out of a June 1998 conference sponsored by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Center for the Study of Southern Industrialization. With the premise that the first wave of Southern industrialization comprising mature natural-resource-based industries stumbled in the period between the two world wars, the conference focused on the “second wave” beginning in the 1940s, during which the region underwent a more diversified, more thorough, and more lasting transformation. The call for papers solicited contributions from “historians, sociologists, geographers, urban or rural studies researchers, and public policy analysts.” Individual contributions could be firm-, industry-, or locationspecific, but the conference aimed for insights into broader economic processes.

At the turn of the twentieth century, successive waves of innovation began to redefine the fields of media and communication: the telegraph (invented in the middle of the nineteenth century and commonplace by the early twentieth), “wireless telegraphy,” AM radio, FM radio, and monochrome and then color television. Set against this backdrop of steady technological advance, the breakthroughs of recent years—the Internet and mobile telephony for example—are not really such breakthroughs after all, but merely the latest rounds of a patiently unfolding cycle.

Economic development is a fragile thing. This book examines the transformation of the southwestern corner of North Carolina from a region with intermittent prosperity in the early part of the twentieth century to an economically stagnant region that has not shared in the tremendous recent economic growth in the southeastern United States. For much of the nineties, this southeastern region from North Carolina to Georgia was the fastest growing region in the United States. What happened to the mountain region and how did it get left out? Taylor rejects simplistic models of an isolated mountain region exploited by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and outside capitalists. Instead, he presents the process of economic change as similar to development in the rest of the South: that is, the result of an interplay between outsiders and mountain people who were never economically isolated from the rest of the country, and who were adept at taking advantage of whatever economic opportunities presented themselves. Many local residents, for example, were very keen about the establishment of a national park in this part of the Smoky Mountains because they thought it would bring in tourists and boost the local economy. Similarly, many locals supported the construction of the Fontana Dam on the Little Tennessee River; also hoping it would bring economic benefits to the region. Ultimately, however, the result was not one they wanted or intended.

Ronald A. Smith, professor emeritus of Kinesiology at Penn State University, has written several books on the history of college sports, most notably, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). This book dealt with the development of American intercollegiate athletics from crew races in the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginnings of the NCAA in response to a football crisis in the first decade of the twentieth century. His focus was on the role of commercialization in college sports from the start, and the attempts by coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents to benefit from athletics.

Ian MacLachlan has written an excellent overview and introduction to the beef-commodity supply chain in Canada, as it has existed from the late nineteenth century to the present. From the “kill” of slaughtering, to the “chill” of the refrigerated train car or truck, to the roast or hamburger in the supermarket, MacLachlan concisely describes all aspects of this important, but understudied, Canadian agricultural and consumer product. As there are no comparable studies that cover this time period or this number of aspects of beef production and sale, his book fills a research niche in the examination of Canada's past and “almost present” agricultural history.

John Pencavel is a highly respected labor economist who in this work has written a small gem of new institutional analysis. This book deserves a readership among economic historians because it is a model of how institutional differences can be analyzed empirically. In this work Pencavel undertakes a theoretical and empirical analysis of cooperatives in the lumber industry in the Pacific Northwest.

Pencavel begins his work by pointing out that the bargain between employers and workers tends to favor the employer. That is, that labor markets at their most fundamental level are not as efficient as, say, the market for tomatoes. Participants, especially employees, face relatively large search and information costs, which, along with the public-goods aspect of work, means entry and exit does not necessarily lead to optimal outcomes.

This diverse collection of essays had their foundation in a 1997 conference hosted by the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This event brought together a range of academics, National Park Service (NPS) employees, commercial interests, and local residents to examine the forces shaping western tourism, both past and present. Subsequently those revised papers, selected for inclusion in this volume, were combined with commissioned essays and some pieces that had already been published to offer an interdisciplinary selection that is thought-provoking for historians and westerners alike. For historians the collection has significance beyond the regional debate about how western history should be written and appreciated. It points to new and potential developments for economic, business, and social historians, some of whom will need to put on new spectacles and adopt new techniques of analysis if they are to examine this important industry.