A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ECONOMIC LIFE

by Edward C. Kirkland '16, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1951. pp. XIII,74O. $5.00.

In this third edition of his widely used and justly popular college textbook Professor Kirkland has reorganized or rewritten upwards of three quarters of the original material and brought his history down to the middle of the twentieth century. The result is a mature, scholarly and readable study in which judicious attention has been given to scholarly publication in the field since the appearance of the revised edition of 1939.

Perhaps the outstanding feature of the book lies in the matter of analysis and interpretation. Here Professor Kirkland is at his best, and it would be a dull student, indeed, who failed to profit from a careful reading of the topics covered in the text. Nor would the reading be particularly arduous for Professor Kirkland writes well, and with due attention to the human as well as the technical aspects of his subject. Indeed, the book should appeal quite as much to the thoughtful general reader as to the undergraduate student of American economic history.

Noteworthy in respect to exposition and interpretation are the various chapters dealing with foreign commerce and the merchant marine, the industrial and agricultural revolutions, banking and finance, the labor movement, and domestic commerce and transportation. Equally interesting, but perhaps somewhat more controversial, is the discussion of the "trend toward the governmentalization of the economy" in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Of this trend the author remarks, as of the mid twentieth century, "But though the march toward government business had gone far, it had not gone the full way. In the late forties the economy still remained a mixed one, the despair of the logician and the systemizer. In spite of its many vicissitudes and guises, it proved a productive economy." It had, in fact, "brought a standard of living without parallel elsewhere in the world."

For the interested reader an excellent descriptive and critical bibliography, organized under the several chapter headings, offers many suggestions for further reading and study.