John Steele Gordon

Throughout time the great empires built and maintained their dominion through force of arms and political power over alien peoples. In this illuminating work of history, John Steele Gordon tells the extraordinary story of how the United States became the first country to dominate the world through the creation of wealth. The American economy is by far the world's largest, the most dynamic and innovative. But America has also been lucky. The resilient economy continually suffered through adversity and catastrophes. It survived a recession after the Revolution, a decision by Andrew Jackson that left the country without a central bank for nearly eighty years, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Having weathered those trials, the economy became vital enough to Americanize the world in recent decades. Virtually every major development in technology in the twentieth century originated in the United States, and as the products of those technologies traveled around the globe, the result was a subtle, peaceful, and pervasive spread of American culture and perspective.