At one end of Wall Street sits Trinity Church. Behind the church is a cemetery. A young man named Alexander Hamilton, whose ideas were fundamental in making Wall Street into what it is today, chose this cemetery as his final resting place. Hamilton and Jefferson would debate how a young bankrupt country might best recover from the expense of the Revolutionary War. It would be a complex task to navigate a financial recovery between Wall Street...

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism features Naomi Klein explaining the ideas and research behind her bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In this riveting lecture and interview, Klein challenges and exposes the popular myth of the free market economy's peaceful global victory Around the world there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos, exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally implement their policies....

In 1989, the Brazilian Worker's Party altered the concept of local government when they installed participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, allowing residents to participate directly in the allocation of city funds. Ten years later, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was swept into power with the promise of granting direct participation to the Venezuelan people; who have now formed tens of thousands of self-organized communal councils. In the Southern...

Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and...

"Today's most urgent problems are fundamentally global. They require nothing less than concerted, planetwide action if we are to secure a long-term future. But humanity's story has always been on a global scale, and this history deeply informs the present. In this book, Jeffrey D. Sachs, renowned economist and expert on sustainable development, turns to world history to shed light on how we can meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first...

"In August of 1942, as fascism threatened to sweep the world, Wendell Willkie, a charismatic Republican businessman who had run for president two years earlier, boarded the Gulliver and set out with Roosevelt's blessing on a journey by air around the world. As he visited the battlefront in North Africa with General Montgomery, debated a frosty de Gaulle in Lebanon, met with wavering officials in Istanbul and Tehran, almost failed to deliver a letter...

For four thousand years, the size and vitality of cities, economies, and empires were heavily determined by infection. Striking humanity in waves, the cycle of plagues set the tempo of civilizational growth and decline, since common response to the threat was exclusion—quarantining the sick or keeping them out. But the unprecedented hygiene and medical revolutions of the past two centuries have allowed humanity to free itself from the hold of epidemic...