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Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland . By Geraldo L. Cadava . Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 2013. 320 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, index. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-674-05811-8 .
A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida . By N. D. B. Connolly . Chicago : Chicago University Press , 2014. 376 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth, $45.00. ISBN: 978-0-226-11514-6 .
Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy . By Jenifer Van Vleck . Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 2013. 370 pp. Illustrations, maps, photography, notes, index. Cloth, $45.00. ISBN: 978-0-674-05094-5 .
Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA . By Benjamin C. Waterhouse . Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press , 2014. xi + 345 pp. Illustrations, photographs, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $39.50. ISBN: 978-0-691-14916-5 .
Review Essays
The best work in the new "history of capitalism" field borrows from the tool kits of social and cultural historians and rests on the assumption that states, societies, and markets cannot be treated separately from one another. That central observation feeds the contemporary impulse to reconnect subfields, such as business, labor, and politics, which had drifted apart since the 1970s. Already this methodology has returned scholarship on the nineteenth-century United States to the topics of slavery's relationship to capitalism and the realization of selfhood either through manumission, the labor market, or finance.
The current political-economic turn's influence on twentieth-century U.S. research seems, at least initially, far less coherent. For example, books lumped under the "capitalism" rubric have documented the lived experiences of consumer creditors, Wall Street speculators, retail shoppers, supply chain managers, long-haul truckers, free-market theorists, factory managers, and conservative politicians. Yet a close read of a sampling of recent books, either clearly or loosely connected with this scholastic fulcrum, indicates that a new holistic sense of the American experiment's place in the world of political economy may be taking shape.
One recurrent question, for instance, is why the apparent increase in global trade fluidity, starting in the early Cold War and accelerating since the 1960s, coincided with declining social mobility and growing economic inequality in the twentieth century's second half. This question appears be...