Introduction : some initial definitions and organizational strategies -- Colonial roots -- Mercantilism, british colonialism, and independence -- Mercantilism and European commercial expansion, 1450-1750 -- The establishment of English colonies in North America -- Colonial unrest and revolution -- The new nation : from revolution to civil war -- Defining the new nation -- New political institutions in a new nation -- Competitive capitalist industrial development -- Regions, sections, and civil war -- Contrasting patterns of regional development -- Sectional conflict and war -- Fifty years after the Civil war -- Wartime legislation, western expansion, and reconstruction -- Wartime policy initiatives -- Federal government finances -- The conquest of the Western Frontier -- Presidential and congressional reconstruction in the South -- Changing forms of industrial development -- Finance capitalist industrialization : new patterns -- Social change, politics, and reform -- The end of reconstruction in the U.S. South -- New social structures -- The reform impulse -- Progressives and reforms -- The United States in the world -- International trade and investment -- Ambivalent colonialism -- Into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries -- War, depression, war -- World War I and the domestic reform agenda -- Post-war troubles and issue -- New tendencies in the U.S. economy -- The Great Depression -- World War II and war capitalism -- Post-World War II recovery, institutional innovation, and the modern times political economy, 1945-1980s -- Postwar reconstruction of the international political economy -- Tumultuous post-World War II years in the United States -- The structure of modern times -- Modern times in motion -- The demise of the Bretton woods system and the dissolution of U.S. modern times, 1980s into the twenty-first century -- The success and failure of the Bretton woods system -- President Ronald Reagan's two terms -- The end of U.S. modern times -- New patterns in the U.S economy -- The great recession, austerity, and three worrisome tendencies -- The genesis of the great recession -- Worrisome trends -- U.S. presidents -- Glossary -- Notes -- References -- Index.