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.

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.

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.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

There is an interesting map up at Newsweek‘s web site illustrating what the magazine calls “a surprising correlation between the […]

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

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

Having been to more than my share of very sparsely-attended indie rock shows and history conference panels in recent years, the thought has occurred more than once that “mid-career” academic historians have much in common with a lot of the veteran indie musicians I go to see: well-known within a certain dispersed circle of cognoscenti, perhaps even established in certain way, but doing something too particular in its appeal to ever achieve more than the most modest sort of popularity.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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: 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: Money

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

While the Founders of the United States have seen their reputations downgraded in some quarters over the past few decades, […]

Browse by Subject