"Popular histories of organized crime in the United States often look to the "Mafia" and the sons of early twentieth-century immigrants--such as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky--for their origins. In this second edition of Organized Crime and American Power, Michael Woodiwiss...

Chapter 1: Behind the Scenes of the Louisiana Purchase -- Chapter 2: Setting Up the Finance for the Louisiana Purchase -- Chapter 3: “The Present Order of Things” in January 1803 -- Chapter 4: Baring & Hope Anticipate Financing the Louisiana Purchase -- Chapter 5: All The Players Were...

How do majority groups respond to a narrowing of inequality in racially polarized environments? We study this question by examining the effects of the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency created after the U.S. Civil War to provide aid to former slaves and launch institutional reform in the South. We...

Like today, one hundred years ago air pollution was a matter of grave concern in the world's most polluted cities. In the wake of its famous 1908-9 social survey, the City of Pittsburgh commissioned an "Economic Survey of Pittsburgh" from John T. Holdsworth, a prominent institutional economist...

We use the German bombing of London during the Second World War as an exogenous source of variation to provide evidence on neighborhood effects. We construct a newly-digitized dataset at the level of individual buildings on wartime destruction, property values, and socioeconomic composition in...

We examine the long transition from water to steam power in US manufacturing, focusing on early users of mechanical power: lumber and flour mills. Digitizing Census of Manufactures manuscripts for 1850 to 1880, we show that as steam costs declined, manufacturing activity grew faster in counties...