Loft Living or Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change

Author: Sharon Zukin

Behind the dirty, cast-iron facades of nineteenth-century loft buildings, an elegant style of life developed during the 1960s and 1970s. This style of life -- of using the city as a consumption mode -- was tied to the presence of artists, whose "happenings," performances, and studio spaces shaped a public perception of the good life at the center of the city.

Loft Living exposes the meeting of art and real estate markets, the happy meeting between artists' demands for housing and city officials and homeowners who wanted to "upgrade" their neighborhoods by private market means -- and how those artists were used and abandoned by real estate developers and investors who were banking on rising property values.

This is a story of how downtown New York City became a "scene," how loft apartments became hot commodities, and how investors, corporations, and the patrician elite profited from deindustrializing Manhattan and then filling it with an "artistic mode of production." For anyone who has admired historic preservation on Main Street or the waterfront, anyone who wonders if New York, London, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston still have room for artists and blue-collar workers, Loft Living explains the new urban political economy.

Book review: Offshoring Information Technology or The WorkPlace

Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

Author: Louis Filler

This famous study — one of the most influential in the area of American economic history — brought a halt to Americans' uncritical reverence for their country's revolutionary past. Questioning the Founding Fathers' motivations in drafting the Constitution, it viewed the results as a product of economic self-interest. Perhaps the most controversial books of its time.

Library Journal

In this 1913 volume, Beard, the founder of the New School for Social Research, contends that the Founding Fathers included a clear strategy for Colonial economics in the writing of the Constitution. A staple for history and economics collections. (Classic Returns, LJ 11/1/98)

Booknews

Beard (1874-1948), who taught at Columbia University and was a founder of The New School for Social Research, uses the letters, papers, and documents of the men who took part in framing and adopting the Constitution to assess their economic interests in it. The new introduction to this classic in American historiography provides a sense of the person behind the book. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction to the Transaction Edition
	Introduction to the 1935 Edition
	Preface
I	Historical Interpretation in the United States	1
II	A Survey of Economic Interests in 1787	19
III	The Movement for the Constitution	52
IV	Property Safeguards in the Election of Delegates	64
V	The Economic Interests of the Members of the Convention	73
VI	The Constitution as an Economic Document	152
VII	The Political Doctrines of the Members of the Convention	189
VIII	The Process of Ratification	217
IX	The Popular Vote on the Constitution	289
X	The Economics of the Vote on the Constitution	253
XI	The Economic Conflict over Ratification as Viewed by Contemporaries	292
	Index	327