To Serve God and Wal-Mart; The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. [10], 372, [2] pages. Contains 8 pages of black and white photographs between pages 144 and 145. Full page black and white map of the Ozarks opposite page 1. Also contains Abbreviations in Notes, Notes, Acknowledgments, and Index. Bethany Moreton is a series editor for Columbia University Press's Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism and the Spring 2020 Heilbroner Fellow in Capitalism Studies at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her first book, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise won the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in U.S. history, the John Hope Franklin Award for the best book in American Studies, and the Emerging Scholar in the Humanities award from the University of Michigan. She is a founding member of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas and a founding faculty member of Freedom University. In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America's devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, missionaries, and free-marketers. Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad. While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart's world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that enables corporate globalization.