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.

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.

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

Indiana’s Infidel Congressman Locals refer to southwestern Indiana as “The Pocket,” but politicians know this region by a more ominous […]

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Nineteenth century social and economic knowledge at once functioned as an instrument of capitalism while also serving as a tool for minimizing capitalism’s most disturbing consequences.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Greenberg’s unique angle nicely complements the existing literature on working-class households and labor activism, yet it will simultaneously force scholars of the period to rethink their entire approach to investigating working men.

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.

July 29, 2008 Tennessee church shooter targets conservative historical fiction It appears that the angry white guy who shot up […]

Browse by Subject