It was a relentless circle of brutal exploitation in which the salt raked by Mary Prince and other enslaved people was sold to northern fishermen who sold it back southward in the form of salted fish with which to feed the enslaved who raked the salt.

Four years on, a disability-informed reading of “Bartleby” seems to address even more urgently the crises our students face.

Women’s work is often hidden or marginal within historical records that were meant to show men’s economic and political lives.

Part of the utility of the game is how many intersections can be addressed, a Choose Your Own Adventure of lesson planning.

By leading the risky but eventually successful financial operation, Elisha justified his name.

Women’s economic labor was essential to state function.

The dispossession of Native lands for the purposes of organizing English tobacco plantations was a deepening and broadening of merchant capitalism in Virginia.

Depending on one’s relationship to the monetary regime, coining could either appear a heinous offense that threatened the ruling order by undermining public trust in its currency, or a creative solution to the shortage of specie across much of the Atlantic world.

He held multiple allegiances during the Revolution, all of which were connected or stemmed from the importance he placed on familial self-preservation.

Brockmann’s research and her insightful arguments taught me not only that plenty of knowledge production occurred in Central America before the 1820s but also that this “practical” information was designed to serve locals rather than foreigners.

Marine insurance itself was a business that flourished during periods of war and uncertainty. It had a complex relationship with the British state.

The poems of “Kingdom” are spirit-drawings, in the tradition of the Harmonists’ erstwhile Shaker acquaintances. On occasion they quote bits of Harmonist texts.

Indeed, early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years. This deeper history of salt shaped space, relations, and power dynamics during the eighteenth century in ways both explicit and obscure.

William Cronon presents in Nature’s Metropolis an assertion of the fundamental interconnectedness of the city and the countryside. This is figured in the history of Chicago, primarily in the nineteenth century, as the city grew from the commodification of the produce of its rural environs.

Precisely because images were so extensively braided into the milieu, their distinctive handlings of Americans in need or suddenly having to do with less—in other words, what these images did and did not show—were important in defining the Republic between the Revolution and the Civil War.

By the end of the 1820s, Skidmore’s experiences in the workplace and at the polls led him to connect the revolutionary legacy of 1776 to a biting critique of the economic hierarchies that continued to structure society.

The painting suggests a work environment so deplorable that even the skilled, sober-minded, American-born workers have walked out.

Baltimore grew into America’s third-largest city in these years, and that growth was fueled by runaway slaves and white men driven to the city by changes in rural agriculture as much as by immigration from abroad.

The Stewart Children instances passionately held ideas about the common welfare structuring a painting that sought to have a moral and social impact on viewers.

2016 will mark not just the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, but also the 200th anniversary of the creation of the first ever lobbying agency in the national capital, an agency that was founded by a Delaware factory manager named Isaac Briggs.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

There is a romantic notion that this American expansion was achieved by settlers unaided by government—the rugged frontiersmen of the mythic West. In reality, however, the United States expanded through state action.

In the years that followed the annexation, plans for the next North American grab (or purchase) of Mexican lands became a regular topic of debate on the pages of U.S. newspapers.

The book is both an intersectional study of crime and an intersectional study of gender, poverty, and class.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Franklin had designed his currency to nurture Americans’ fortitude and resolve.

Carp’s Boston Sons of Liberty are not the vanguard of the revolutionary era, as we have often seen them depicted, but rather a lot of wayward republicans.

As the century wore on, commercial music figured increasingly in the musical lives of Americans, significantly multiplying the choices available to audiences and elevating their aesthetic sophistication.

In the two decades following the Revolutionary War, one of the most critical and troubling questions facing the emerging nation was thus whether Americans would enjoy the free navigation of the Mississippi River.

Crèvecoeur, William Bartram, Jefferson, and Audubon appropriate the “ideological assumptions, discursive conventions, and representational techniques” of earlier Caribbean natural histories to debate the implications of plantation slavery for a nation ostensibly committed to equality.

One of the most common printed images of the first half of the nineteenth century was also the one of […]

Is there anything more ludicrous than the present day barbeque contests in which contestants are prohibited from supplying meat that might be more sapid than those of their fellows?

“Face-to-face interpersonal relations took on far more importance in this society than abstract, impersonal economic relations, symbolized by commercial paper (whose origin might be unknown) or distant banks.”

The commodification of intimacy has long worried the bourgeoisie, which otherwise enjoyed the fruits of the widening web of commercial exchange.

Celilo Falls was the economic and spiritual center of the Indian world in the Pacific Northwest.

Indians and English people shared a measure of common ground in their understanding of animals.

To understand why credit was more important than cash in the activities of any eighteenth-century trader, we have to recapture what it was to buy and sell goods at the time.

An eighteenth-century novel explores how American society handles the collateral damage of capitalism—and who deserves a second chance.

These versions of the Panic are capsules that carry other versions of the history of American capitalism into the bloodstream of historical consciousness.

Harry Franco and Henry Ward Beecher in the antebellum market

…the discourse of safety pioneered by the insurance industry brought about important transformations in urban design, architecture, and public health.

“Regardless of who was engaged in the business, the very nature of the business seemed to contradict the United States’s conception of itself, and thus the broker and the pawner were to remain objects of a derision that went beyond ethnic prejudice.”

If history is any guide, the Treasury Department has an uphill fight ahead of it; counterfeiters have a knack for circumventing almost any obstacle put in their way.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Massachusetts’ earliest laws were hostile to bowling.”

Those Separatists who emigrated directly from England and those who had just left Leyden, Holland, would have been equals in their ability to recognize that whaling could be an immensely profitable business.

The ephemerality of this document contrasts with the indelible event it announced: Spain’s final closure of the port of New Orleans to Americans.

Could we assume that this lowly agent of a midsize flour dealer on the lower Delaware was behaving like Jay Gould a hundred years later?

Rice revolutionized life in Carolina, making the colony the richest in British North America. South Carolina also became home to the American mainland’s most brutal slave regime.

There was only one source of value in coin, Locke was saying, and that was its silver content.

Rao’s story is less about federal financial policy than about how these laws worked on a daily basis. What develops is a story about the culture of Atlantic capitalism on the waterfront.

Jefferson used the library he sold to Congress as a self-fashioning project to shape his legacy and the way he wished to be viewed by posterity.

Growing increasingly three-dimensional and more ornate with every added layer of material, sentimental or “fancy” valentines, as they were called, were harbingers of hope, fondness, and desire.

Salisbury’s purchases clearly evoke the image of a young man concerned with meeting the expectations of Worcester’s privileged class.

Brothel guides’ positive descriptions of well-behaved, mannered, self-conscious brothelgoers suggested that if such genteel, respectable men allowed themselves to enjoy the sexual pleasures for sale in American cities, then why couldn’t the reader himself?

A meditation on early nineteenth-century Chinese portraits of George Washington.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Even within itself, the China trade was a complex, multisided, many-splendored thing . . .

The Americans had to decide whether to support the British when doing so meant potentially damaging their nation’s relationship with China in its infancy.

From imaginary vantage points along major streets, [writers] traced the life of the metropolis from its first vigorous stirrings before dawn through its murmurs and rustlings deep in the night.

In eighteenth-century America, Christmas gift exchange was marked by a powerful reciprocity: one gave a present and received one back

For Fisher as well as for Parsons making a self-portrait was, finally, an act of self-memorialization.

Nationalists […] aimed to rally Americans with the cry that the young nation could teach Old Europe a lesson or two about the industrial age on its own turf.

In Rezek’s view, the national literatures of the U.S., Ireland, and Scotland look less like the pure reflections of their respective cultures or peoples than, collectively, like a set of provincial riffs off a metropolitan literary standard.

Did fugitive slaves find haven on naval ships? And […] could I trace the lives of some of the colored mariners I had identified from other sources?

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Descriptive and analytical, the sea eye serves also as a metaphor and a theory of representation.

Anthony’s readings focus on texts where professional male figures seek some form of psychological compensation for the threats to their manhood posed by the potential for financial instability.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The timepiece boasted a calendar wheel and a moon dial, and it played seven tunes, one for each day of the week, and added a psalm for Sunday.”

Booth does impressive work to illuminate Salem tableaus that don’t often get recreated in such detail, from the bustle of life along Union Wharf to the seedy rooms of the Mumford bar and brothel on the edge of town.

In Bermuda’s new maritime economy it was labor, not land, that was key.

Harmony was essential to the business of piracy; pirates who got along with one another stood a better chance of success in their ventures.

“Encouraged by ideological constructions of clerking as an apprenticeship leading to mercantile proprietorship, clerks often found their hopes frustrated by obstinate realities.”

Patent trolls are of much too recent origin for Jefferson to have ever looked one in the eye.

By the 1830s, Americans more confidently adopted a modern notion of the self—made through purely individualistic means in the market—and obscured its formation through familial, communal, and national ties.

Capitalism and the state were not (and are not) separate and autonomous operations, and “free trade” was sometimes combined with military aggression.

He [Hamilton] did not trust ordinary American voters.

  Read Statement on Poetic Research for Two Pieces   Cape Cod 1837 [found document: obituary] Jan 19, 1837, Barnstable County […]

Public opinion, explosive economic growth, and jealous state legislatures would not countenance the abolition of corporations.

Europeans embraced tobacco’s healing properties, just as the Aztec did, and the consumption of chocolate in European culture “simultaneously served to fortify social bonds and underscore, or even confer, distinction”

It turns out that historians’ inconsistent chronology had not actually been “wrong”; it was incomplete.

In this wonderful snapshot of the relationship between economic systems and social hierarchies in eighteenth-century New York, Serena Zabin offers […]

The books under review here all concern power, its loss and its consolidation.

The labor theory of settlement contains some conflicts with the standard liberal account.

As an undergraduate at Wake Forest University, I joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. While I appreciated little of the […]

In a three-day period in August 1835, Baltimoreans engaged in a tumultuous riot that killed five people, injured twenty others, […]

Why are we so readily drawn to cons of all stripes?

Benevolence purchased a respectability that could transcend religious denominations.

Economic concepts are explored in this book, but without the intimidating formulas and regressions that would normally send students accustomed to a predominantly narrative-driven discipline running for the hills.

Baics’s primary concern is to understand the benefits and costs of public markets and their deregulation for the living standards and material well-being of all of the city’s inhabitants.

Few topics in Atlantic history elicit more debate or stronger feelings than the transatlantic slave trade.

Carla Mulford’s new book examines Benjamin Franklin’s approach to empire.

James Kidder’s Market Street painting offers rich fodder for a meditation on the complex histories of private profit and public good in the cultural realm.

Common-place talks with Brian Murphy about the business and politics of early New York State.

Paul Revere was the only major patriot who was also a founder—literally. He started a successful iron foundry in 1788, […]

As a literary scholar, I think we need to reevaluate . . . enthusiasm about Piketty’s use of literature as data.

If Piketty had turned to literary writing before Austen, he would have found a world teeming with the world-creating energies of overseas trade that economic historians take very seriously.

Piketty invites us to take seriously the forms of value discussed and represented in literary texts, and to call into question the tendency to treat everything in purely quantitative economic terms.

Piketty draws attention to the mystique surrounding economics, encapsulated in the notion that it is far too complex for the non-specialist to understand.

To speak of the imperfection and incompleteness of numerical data is, for Piketty, a way of speaking about the work of the economist.

The birth of a nation is not only or always a national story.

Those Americans will, I am afraid, still fleece you. —John Keats in a letter to his brother George living in Louisville, Kentucky, 1819.

Putting the French in their rightful place in American history, Gitlin insists, requires “put[ting] Parkman behind us.”

Adam Smith never attached the invisible hand of the market to a fully formed body, but he and his fellow […]

After the provisions trade with Cape Breton had been reduced to a trickle following its prohibition by the New York General Assembly, the French enemy was supplied by way of the neutral Dutch and Danish islands in the West Indies.

The world was rife with risk and uncertainty for early America’s urban middle classes, facing as they did the caprices […]

Brian Murphy’s argues that the seeds of business corporations were planted during the early republic.

Slave financiers and shippers influenced the trajectory of American capitalism more directly than any other group of entrepreneurs during the antebellum era.

Sometimes we find new ways of seeing by facing the wrong direction.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation.

Thinking about books as objects that were processed, stored, and packaged by industrialists (I use the term advisedly, instead of “printer”) like Isaiah Thomas helps re-orient the way we think about literature in early America.

The continental versus Atlantic debate is more about historiography than history.

Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 350 pp., $29.99.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Acting out of a world still organized around the tenets of mercantilism, colonial Americans invented another approach to value.

More than two centuries into our national experiment, it is still a vexing question: What is popular sovereignty? Who are […]

The cast of characters in Robert Love’s Warnings is astonishing. William Collier, a British veteran of the Seven Years’ War, journeyed to Boston from as far as South Carolina and East Florida in hopes of obtaining passage back to England.

Exploring the materiality of early American paintings and prints, Jennifer Roberts’ excellent new book spans the 1760s to the 1850s in three fascinating case studies, each involving the complex transport of art.

In Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt, Catherine Cangany explores what might best be called the “soft economics” of Detroit’s integration into the Atlantic world.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The sense of purpose that guided settlers, that covered the distance from old to new, created a most bourgeois environment of great expectations, of possibilities, even entitlement.”

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s bloody fourth year, it is perhaps appropriate to ask: […]

Today it can sound like a cliché, but “follow the money” is actually pretty good advice if you’re a reporter […]

In the two hundred years between the Revolution and the 1980s, over a dozen episodes of overextended credit or speculative frenzies grew into full-fledged financial panics, some followed by years of depression.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Even before the confirmation of the gold discoveries—or simultaneously with the confirmation—the French began to think about the significance of California as an American possession.

Pawning past and present

The backlash against these American laws and their increasingly global reach raises a question: does this regime of intellectual property law represent something intrinsic about the United States—not just its economy, but its culture and society?

How did a working-class drunkard with little formal education become a narrator of hard times to society at large?

“[S]ilver was the magnet, the engine, the driving passion, the dazzling reward.”

Published as part of the Special Edition: “First Person: The 38th Voyage”

I took from time with the Morgan an energized and reconceived sense of how to stage participatory projects, both within the academy and under the aegis of other cultural institutions.

Taken together, the short essays gathered here point out the ways in which numbers and graphs constitute narratives, and insist that data’s stories are just as constructed as those found in words and novels.

At first glance the map may not seem like the work of one of the best-informed Frenchmen in colonial Louisiana…

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Jacob Perkins had invented a technology so elegant, and so perfect, that security printers would rely on it for the better part of two centuries.

Like countless other men of his generation, Bullard began his working life as an artisan and ended it as a businessman.

In essence, what is taken as the fruit of the fig is its flower.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The fascination of American men of letters with Henry Moss, the African American seeming to turn white, however, mirrored their denial of the possibility that whites might turn black.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The mission of the expedition begun for imperial adventure, expansion, and wealth for Russia in the North Pacific was both an ambitious and an ambiguous one.

Economic panics are telling historical moments that reveal the structural complexities of the interdynamics between the global and local.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Entering the world of big money meant encountering the challenges of empire.

One may still hear such wardrobes called “armers” in the Deep South, where they were ubiquitous in an era before built-in closets and pantries became de rigeur.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The value of silver for individual Europeans was obvious and longstanding: it meant wealth. For governments, it meant not just wealth, but also power.

Even as Democrats condemned powerful private institutions in the name of equality, the most prescient nineteenth-century observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, applauded those institutions.

With so many uses, the almanac, like an iPhone, was truly interactive.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“In a city increasingly characterized by class and ethnic distinctions, the trip in by train was arguably the one significant personal experience that more Chicagoans had in common than any other.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“It was very hot and damp six months a year, it was one of the least-favored ports in the New World, and huge swarms of insects appeared seasonally with terrifying predictability.”

Two inches wide and eleven feet long, it mapped, among other things, a reunited nation.

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.

The life of the poor … is saturated with market logic, a logic experienced as the perpetual loss of one’s possessions to the anonymous forces of greater purchasing power.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Because antebellum northern cities could be worrisome and puzzling, exactly because they were so incontestably changeful, and perhaps also because, as a result, urban vistas departed so dramatically from the iconic, reassuring visions of rural America—for such reasons, there was a generalized desire, indeed a broadly felt necessity, to develop firmer understandings of the urban milieu.

Through what mechanism do actual people suffer when a bank fails? To the modern ear, the very question sounds naïve, at best.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Our authors help us notice that men and women who are curious are themselves sometimes turned into curiosities.”

The archive is small but so is the country, and because of that it remains manageable.

As the crisis intensified, the notion that each man assumed responsibility for his economic fate seemed increasingly flawed. Everyone, that is, was ready to claim credit for prosperity; none were willing to confess to personal failure.

Accounting was not an orderly process, but rather a vigorous and open-ended mixing and remixing of information.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

By 1819, with many thousands of worthless books circulating as inflated currency, the bankruptcy of a bookseller was a frequent occurrence.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Both the supporters and detractors of the Vigilance Committee claimed to have not only God and the right, but also ‘the ladies’ on their side.”

A close examination of Josiah Warren’s utopian form of currency.

Before independence from Britain, North American merchants belonged to an imperial trade network that spanned the globe, from nearby Jamaica […]

Lorenzo Dow Dreams of Empire in the Era of Good Feelings Before they left for a preaching tour of England […]

The early banks were typically established by individuals with common ties—whether political, social, or commercial in nature.

Well-meaning educators are often unwittingly sabotaging their lessons before they have a chance to get them off of the ground.

I treasure many of the conversations I had with my fellow citizens at their doorsteps, and I think if I had been blessed with musical talent, I could have waxed as lyrical about suburbanites as another Woody did about hoboes and Okies.

Schocket builds the case for how the economic elite of Philadelphia reasserted power and authority by using the corporate form to counter the leveling effect of the Revolution.

The high cost of being poor in America

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

The dollar provided Americans with a common numeraire, a uniform way of expressing economic value … Only over the course of the nineteenth century, though, did a truly national economy, with a high degree of regional specialization, emerge.

Colonial newspapers generally located maps with goods that in turn were associated with literacy and refinement, in particular with interior decoration and visual culture.

What was the meaning of the Revolution for African Americans and whites in Rhode Island in terms of their understanding of race and citizenship?

The colony established a model for success that all subsequent English colonies would follow.

I imagined that my investigations might end up in a decisive graph that would map the number of pages printed against the number of Buddhist converts to Christianity.

Were [Fijians] a race of their own or a mix of many?

The smuggling business represented the effort of small producers (who claimed simply to be free traders) in an economically marginal environment to take advantage of external market demand, and it contributed to the growth of the local middle class that took part in it.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Neither the movie nor Asbury’s books help historians in getting Americans to understand the true nature of nineteenth-century urban America.”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Not only did it seem possible that species were radically different in the New World, but some early observers reported evidence that the boundaries between the plant and animal kingdoms were crossed in some cases.”

This article is presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

“Who or what gave these metals . . . their peculiar qualities for serving as coined money?” asked A Currency Primer of 1896. “Men did not,” came the answer. “Law did not. Government could not. It was done by Nature.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“With the cities’ growing political awareness and new methods and ideas, Bridenbaugh celebrates them as the seedbeds of a nascent American identity, the Enlightenment in the New World, the American Revolution, and its concurrent social transformations.”

The contents of the issue fulfill the imperatives of the new Food Studies: to view eating as an agricultural act

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The Russians soon recognized that they would gain greater profits if they could convince skilled native men to do the work for them.

It was the absence of slavery that allowed for fair taxation in the North. Conversely, the paranoia surrounding the future of slavery—or at least the fear that slaves might be taxed to emancipatory levels—afflicted southern polities.

Today nearly half of all Americans own market-traded securities and anyone can gorge themselves on high-interest credit-card debt, yet Wall Street’s idea of deep history is a five-year moving-average price graph.

The archive does not have an online or printed catalogue, which is probably why its visitors’ sign-in book has so few entries. More the pity, since it is one of those rare places with a collection broad enough to cater to a wealth of interests, and yet manageable enough to really work through.

Economic history still has something to tell us.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Many thought Moors a sharp trader, and at times people suspected that he was crooked. This was hardly unusual during these years in Samoa. More than once Moors or one of his traders was accused of using doctored weights when measuring coconuts for purchase, and at least once this endangered the life of one of his traders. Even Robert Louis Stevenson, who relied heavily on Moors in his early years, worried that he might be a huckster.

What separated Virginia from Pennsylvania and condemned the Old Dominion to second-rank industrial status was quite simply slavery.

In the Great Hall, there is such a sense of sameness in the men’s appearances that it does not take much effort to see that personality has been deliberately tamed for the sake of assembling an artificial society, a seamless superstructure open to being expanded, contracted, and reconfigured by house fiat.

Published as part of the Special Edition “First Person: The 38th Voyage”

It is only when middle-class hopes and fears meet the realities of a modern economy that a fuller picture of this class’s experience can emerge.

What’s old is new again

This Article is Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Value means nothing unless it is translated into “real” money. And yet real money is no stable store of value.

This Article is Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Huge crowds in The Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam welcomed Piet Hein as a hero. His valor appealed to the imagination of many young men, especially orphans, who broke off their vocational training to sign up as sailors with the WIC.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Advocates of paper money did not deny its risks, but they also saw it as a resource that could expand the money supply and, in so doing, facilitate exchange and stimulate enterprise.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Whom did state banks, which were primarily privately owned and operated, really represent? What did banknotes, whose value rested largely on trust, likewise represent?

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Nineteenth-century capitalists were frantic system builders, not because of any innate personality trait or some vague ethical imperative handed down by the Protestant Reformation, but because they had destroyed the existing foundations of social order in their rise to power.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Taken together, Paris and Amsterdam throw into bold relief the radical nature of the nineteenth-century city.”

Rice argues that contemporary debates about popular physiology utilized a metaphor that bodies acted as machines and therefore created the notion that all people were natural machine operators.

Friend clearly sets out to engage in the debate over the transition to capitalism in early America.

Taking Native culture seriously requires that we abandon the attempt to put Native wine into European bottles.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Little money fluctuates widely in value, has lots of zeroes, is carried between the breasts of market women, and smells of overripe fruit, diesel smoke, sweat, and flesh.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

They steered southward towards New Zealand, to try to determine if it was the northern tip of a great southern continent.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“[O]ur authors have consciously adopted an untraditional approach to urban history, illustrating the social, legal, and political workings of these young urban societies by writing about a particular incident, a place, an encounter, a person, or a group of urban people.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

As we find ourselves in a new era of North American free trade, will history repeat itself?

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Why would clergymen of the Reformed Church use their office to baptize the offspring of men and women claimed as property by the Dutch West India Company, the premier slave-trading company of the seventeenth century?”

Unlike the courthouse, church, town hall or other purpose-built public structure, the public market of the first half of the nineteenth century welcomed everyone–the farmer with his cabbages to sell, the housewife in search of dinner, the indigent widow-huckster provisioning her basket, and those with nowhere else to go to find shelter, sociability, a job, or a cheap meal.

“Professor Kars, too, tries to walk the path between cultural conflict and structural change, with limited success.”

I have long thought that now-President Obama’s reputation as an orator was little inflated, more by a media and public […]

Whereas during the Revolutionary era wearing American-made clothes signified frugality and private sacrifice for the public good, by the mid-nineteenth century wearing American-made clothes signified prosperity and the rapid growth of the nation’s internal commerce and industrial capacity.

Parent turns to Marxist theory to structure his answer to the question of the origins of the slave system with markedly mixed results.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

From the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth century, few topics aroused such extensive debate.

When horticulturists began developing varieties of the European roots, their delectability for animals mattered as much as their taste as human food.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

[T]he Manila Galleon, rather than being a curio or sideshow, represented one of the turning points in history, for with its establishment we find for the first time “substantial and continuous trade across the Pacific Ocean.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“When the legislature was occupied with other matters, the inattention permitted a kind of anarchy. Nowhere is the fluidity more apparent than in the naming of streets.”

“Why do coffee and business seem to go together so naturally?”

“Taverns were far more numerous than any other type of architectural space besides dwellings.”

If there is a blacklist, I have yet to see it—maybe when I make full professor.

EBay may be a great resource for avid collectors, but it has also opened up a world of antiquarian goods that may have never found their way into an archive or museum before now.

“In their speeches in Philadelphia, their private letters [ . . . ], and their newspaper essays, the Framers made it abundantly clear that they expected the Constitution to benefit creditors and Americans who had speculated, whether in Indian land or war bonds.”

Hillary Clinton’s opponents really need to hold her to her claims about her experience, and make sure she owns up […]

“Americans have long forged deep, intimate, and enduring links with their public buildings.”

Heroic in its synthesizing, perhaps, but not in its style, this book conceives of people lifelessly and in the aggregate.

Appleby’s Americans did not fight the Revolution, nor apparently remember it, nor even spend much time celebrating or thinking about what had happened to the previous generation. Rather, they took the Revolution’s fruits–and ran toward a new future.

Browse by Subject

The card catalog in the Amsterdam Municipal Archive is a thing of legend among Dutch historians . . .