Founded by Benjamin Franklin, USPS was the information network that bound far-flung Americans together, fostered a common culture, and helped American business to prosper. A first class stamp remains one of the greatest bargains of all time, and yet, the USPS is slowly vanishing. Critics say it is slow and archaic. Mail volume is down. The workforce is shrinking. Post offices are closing. This is a multifaceted history, full of remarkable characters,...

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. This title examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil.

"Presents a comprehensive account of economic depressions in America from colonial times to the "Great Recession" that began in 2008." --Dust jacket.

"Plagues upon the Earth is a history of human civilization and the germs that have shaped its course. At every stage in our species' past, micro-organisms have had macro-effects on the development of human societies. Kyle Harper proposes the first history of human disease to make full use of a radical new source of evidence: pathogen genomes as a biological archive and window into prehistoric times. We can now begin to reconstruct the natural history...

"Engaging images accompany information about Lego. The combination of high-interest subject matter and narrative text is intended for students in grades 3 through 7"--

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2016" Jürgen Kocka is a permanent fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin and former president of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. In 2011, he received the Holberg Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the scholarly world. A comprehensive and concise history of capitalism from its origins to today In this authoritative and accessible book, one of the world's most renowned historians...

Why did the size of the U S economy increase by 3 percent on one day in mid-2013 - or Ghana's balloon by 60 percent overnight in 2010? Why did the U K financial industry show its fastest expansion ever at the end of 2008 - just as the world's financial system went into meltdown? This title deals with these questions.

"Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society...

"[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....

An inside account of how English soccer's Premier League became an extreme entertainment empire draws on one hundred interviews with major decision-makers to explore its traditional English origins and its rise from a billionaire experiment to global prominence.