How the contentious world of nineteenth-century banking shaped the United States.Pieces of paper that claimed to be good for two dollars upon redemption at a distant bank. Foreign coins that fluctuated in value from town ...

By the eve of the Great Depression, there existed in America the equivalent of a policy for every man, woman and child, and in Britain it grew from its narrow aristocratic base to cover all ...

Winner of the 2012 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history. Investing in Life considers the creation and expansion of the American life insurance industry from its early origins in the 1810s through the ...

Incorporated on the eve of the Panic of 1837, the Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina owned and hired enslaved individuals to labor in their ironworks, but they also leveraged the market value of this ...

The use of enslaved people as collateral for mortgages exposed them to the larger unpredictability of (what modern economists term) the business cycle. When debtors failed to repay their loans, creditors claimed the collateral and ...

Although the history of banks and banking in the early American republic has received considerable attention from financial and economic historians in recent years, knowledge about this important sector of the economy by the average ...

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.

Kristin Aguilera (ed.), Museum of American Finance Pubisher

Early American life insurers found themselves facing the problem of asymmetric information, as they needed to rely on applicants themselves to provide truthful, complete answers to a standard set of questions. In an attempt to ...

Winner of the Mansutti Foundation Best Paper Prize.

Historians have increasingly examined how economics and business have influenced religion and religious practices, and these examinations have provided better understandings of race, gender, and ethnicity within American religion. As one scholar has noted, looking ...

Provides an overview of Andrew Jackson s life and legacy, grounded in the latest scholarship Features more than 30 essays contributed by leading scholars and historians Synthesizes the most up-to-date scholarship on the pivotal events of ...

Darden Business School case

Review of Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (Columbia, 2017) and Anne Fleming, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard, 2018)