Educational Softwares

Targeting a high school and first- and second-year college audience, this easy-to-read work aims at supporting American history textbooks and providing a one- stop-shopping resource on all that comprises U.S. economic history--people, businesses, industries, events, movements, and trends--with a special emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. A similar specialized encyclopedia, Glenn Porter's Encyclopedia of American Economic History (Scribner, 1980), now dated, presents lengthier essays on movements and ideas only and is intended for more educated lay readers. In contrast, the Gale source consists of a unique array of 1,003 distinctive entries, somewhat confusing in their sheer variety, alphabetically arranged and of various lengths.

Half are brief economic terms and historical and geographical definitions, and the other half are era overviews, issues, biographies, state economic histories, historical events, and company and industry profiles with limited bibliographies.