What does it mean to be an American? What are American ideas and values? American Enterprise, the companion book to a major exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, aims to answer these questions about the American experience through an exploration of its economic and commercial history. It argues that by looking at the intersection of capitalism and democracy, we can see where we as a nation have come from and where we might be going in the future. Richly illustrated with images of objects from the museum’s collections, American Enterprise includes a 1794 dollar coin, Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 telephone, a brass cash register from Marshall Fields, Sam Walton’s cap, and many other goods and services that have shaped American culture. Historical and contemporary advertisements are also featured, emphasizing the evolution of the relationship between producers and consumers over time. Interspersed in the historical narrative are essays from today’s industry leaders—including Sheila Bair, Adam Davidson, Bill Ford, Sally Greenberg, Fisk Johnson, Hank Paulson, Richard Trumka, and Pat Woertz—that pose provocative questions about the state of contemporary American business and society. American Enterprise is a multi-faceted survey of the nation’s business heritage and corresponding social effects that is fundamental to an understanding of the lives of the American people, the history of the United States, and the nation’s role in global affairs.

A large-scale biography of a major figure in American enterprise, the man who built General Electric and founded the Radio Corporation of America. Owen D. Young belonged to a unique American generation: the last to know a country where the majority made their living from the land and the first to feel the full impact of modernization. Born on an upstate New York farm, educated at St. Lawrence, a small college nearby, and armed with a Boston University law degree, Young made a large difference in that transforming change. His early career was with the new and sprawling utilities, and brought him to the attention of the General Electric Company. Joining it in 1913 as vice president and general counsel, and becoming chairman in 1922, with Gerard Swope as president, he soon transformed, with Swope's impressive aid, a large national enterprise into a dominant international one. They were a singularly effective team, enterprising at home and abroad, and notably progressive in labor relations. Always the entrepreneur, Young saw the possibilities of the 'wireless' and so set up the Radio Corporation of America. This is a life of a titan of business, built on the classical pattern of American success.

An incisive look at the intellectual and cultural history of free enterprise and its influence on American politics Throughout the twentieth century, "free enterprise" has been a contested keyword in American politics, and the cornerstone of a conservative philosophy that seeks to limit government involvement into economic matters. Lawrence B. Glickman shows how the idea first gained traction in American discourse and was championed by opponents of the New Deal. Those politicians, believing free enterprise to be a fundamental American value, held it up as an antidote to a liberalism that they maintained would lead toward totalitarian statism. Tracing the use of the concept of free enterprise, Glickman shows how it has both constrained and transformed political dialogue. He presents a fascinating look into the complex history, and marketing, of an idea that forms the linchpin of the contemporary opposition to government regulation, taxation, and programs such as Medicare.

With a focus on a diverse group of Latino entrepreneurs in the Houston area, Valdez explores how class, gender, race, and ethnicity shape Latino entrepreneurs' capacity to succeed in business in the United States.

A leading conservative intellectual argues that to renew America we must recommit to our institutions Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription, rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us and militate against alienation. As Levin argues, now is not a time to tear down, but rather to build and rebuild by committing ourselves to the institutions around us. From the military to churches, from families to schools, these institutions provide the forms and structures we need to be free. By taking concrete steps to help them be more trustworthy, we can renew the ties that bind Americans to one another.

Paul Revere's ride to warn the colonial militia of the British march on Lexington and Concord is a legendary contribution to the American Revolution. This book reveals another side of this American hero's life, that of a transformational entrepreneur instrumental in the industrial revolution. It combines a biographical examination of Revere with a study of the new nation's business and technological climate. A silversmith prior to the Revolution and heralded for his patriotism during the war, Revere aspired to higher social status within the fledgling United States. To that end, he shifted away from artisan silversmithing toward larger, more involved manufacturing ventures such as ironworking, bronze casting, and copper sheet rolling. The author explores Revere's vibrant career successes and failures, social networks, business practices, and the groundbreaking metallurgical technologies he developed and employed. Revere's commercial ventures epitomized what Martello terms proto—industrialization, a transitional state between craft work and mass manufacture that characterizes the broader, fast -- changing landscape of the American economy.

In 1933 choreographer George Balanchine and impresario Lincoln Kirstein embarked on an elusive quest to found a ballet company and school in the United States. Though their efforts would eventually result in the creation of the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, the first decade of their collaborative efforts was anything but assured. Tracing the tangled histories of two of the most important figures in twentieth-century dance, Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise offers a fresh perspective on a pivotal period in cultural history. Deeply researched using sources only made available in recent years, the book challenges the mythologies surrounding the early years of the Balanchine-Kirstein enterprise. It also reveals the full extent of Kirstein's essential role and offers reconstructive analysis of lost works, as well as new and surprising details regarding some of Balanchine's most iconic ballets, including Serenade, Apollo, and Concerto Barocco. This history involved artists including Richard Rodgers, Martha Graham, George Gershwin, Katherine Dunham, Vera Zorina, and Igor Stravinsky, as well as dozens of lesser known players whose contributions have yet to be fully acknowledged. Capturing the full sweep of Balanchine and Kirstein's collaborative work across multiple genres and institutions, this book reveals their partnership in all of its exciting and ungainly complexity, showing how the 1930s Balanchine was not the artist that he would eventually become, and how the same was true of the institutions that he and Kirstein jointly created.

This book describes how American and Japanese management ideologies meet, collide, and contend in the process of competitive cooperation during a joint venture in Japan. In a detailed case study, Hamada describes the very real problems when Japanese and American managers run a business operation, and analyzes them from a comparative, relativistic, and historical perspective. The author presents a novel and effective way of viewing organizational dynamics, seeing the 'unfinished' cultural process between different sub-groups who create and recreate the symbolic meanings of corporate phenomena. Her succinct analysis of Japanese and American behavioral modes makes both practical and theoretical contributions to the field of international management. Highlighting the interdependence between corporate culture and broader societal culture, Hamada looks closely at interactions between American and Japanese businessmen, analyzes their cultural differences, and proposes that these differences can be viewed not just as a source of continuing conflict but of dynamic cooperation.