tariffs and trade

Frederic D. O'Brien | November/December 2003

A federal tariff in 1828 that favored northern industry infuriated southerners and played a role in eventual secession.

On December 19, 1828, South Carolina’s legislature issued a set of resolutions vigorously opposing a tariff that Congress had enacted earlier in the year.

When Tariffs Were in Flower

Bernard A. Weisberger | July/August 1998

In the past century, the two major opponents on the question of free trade have changed sides completely.

The thunder of distant drums is sounding again as protectionists and free traders respond to President Clinton’s efforts to get fast-track authority to negotiate multilateral trading agreements in advance of congressional approval.

Can U.S. Trade Stand Apart?

Peter Baida | February/March 1986

We hear a lot about America’s soaring trade deficit. That deficit has zoomed past $150 billion, and the United States Commerce Department estimates that every billion dollars costs the country 25,000 thousand jobs.

Canada And The United States, A Centennial Retrospective

Bruce Hutchison | June 1967

Can a nice, sensitive, schizophrenic young dominion of only one hundred years find happiness on the border of a rich, overbearing old republic nearly twice her age?

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.