Alternative Tracks or Womans Wage

Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1917

Author: Gerald Berk

Alternative Tracks provides a novel interpretation of industrialization and political development in the United States. Focusing on the critical case of railroads, Gerald Berk shows that alternative forms of economic organization and governmental regulation existed in the late nineteenth century. Constitutional choices, not technological imperatives or economic interests, determined the outcome in the twentieth century: a centralized industry regulated according to liberal principles of redistribution. Alternative Tracks reveals a nineteenth-century rival to this political economy -- an equally efficient and more democratic system of regional railroads regulated according to republican principles.

Booknews

Conventional wisdom has it that the industrial centralization of the US between the Civil War and World War I was driven by the efficiency imperatives of modern technology, with the state hanging onto the rear. Using the railroads as an example, however, Berk (government and international studies, U. of Notre Dame) argues that economic development could have gone in a number of directions, but was highly shaped by interactions with the several branches of government. A main concern of the government, he says, were the constitutional forms of justice relating to the corporations and the market. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Preface
1	Toward a Constitutive Political Economy	1
Pt. I	Corporate Entitlements and National System Building
2	Corporate Capital Markets Transformed	25
3	Reconstituting Fixed Costs	47
Pt. II	Regional Republicanism
4	Regional Republicanism in Policy: Regulated Competition	75
5	Regionalism in Economic Practice: The Chicago Great Western Railway, 1883-1908	116
Pt. III	The Corporate Liberal Basis of Group Politics
6	The Predicament of Regulated Monopoly	153
7	Beyond Corporate Liberalism	179
	Notes	189
	Bibliography	217
	Index	235

New interesting textbook: Whats Fair or I Found It on the Internet

Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

Author: Alice Kessler Harris

Hidden inside everyone's paycheck is a set of social constructs that conveys messages about our lives and social roles. In this path breaking book, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the meanings of women's wages in the United States in the twentieth century.

Library Journal

A wage is more than dollars and cents. It embodies specific, powerful ideas about gender roles, economic goals, and social justice. In this series of essays historian Kessler-Harris ( Out to Work , LJ 3/15/82) explores five struggles over how and why women should be paid for their labor: the early 20th-century debate over the ``living wage''; the legal battle for a minimum wage; public perceptions of working women during the Depression; the political struggle for the Equal Pay Bill; and today's comparable worth controversy. Kessler-Harris's text is dense with ideas and musings about the relationships among wages, women, the labor market, and how these relationships define our social concepts of ``women's role,'' ``fairness,'' and ``equality.'' She argues persuasively for a feminist viewpoint grounded in intense historical analysis. A challenging, thought-provoking book, highly recommended for graduate-level social science collections.-- Donna L. Schulman, Cornell Univ. ILR Lib., New York