Download or read book Bank Notes and Shinplasters written by Joshua R. Greenberg and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The colorful history of paper money before the Civil War Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. This number does not even include the plethora of counterfeit bills and the countless shinplasters of questionable legality issued by unregulated merchants, firms, and municipalities. Adding to the chaos was the idiosyncratic method for negotiating their value, an often manipulative face-to-face discussion consciously separated from any haggling over the price of the work, goods, or services for sale. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how ordinary Americans accumulated and wielded the financial knowledge required to navigate interpersonal bank note transactions. Locating evidence of Americans grappling with their money in fiction, correspondence, newspapers, printed ephemera, government documents, legal cases, and even on the money itself, Greenberg argues Americans, by necessity, developed the ability to analyze the value of paper financial instruments, assess the strength of banking institutions, and even track legislative changes that might alter the rules of currency circulation. In his examination of the doodles, calculations, political screeds, and commercial stamps that ended up on bank bills, he connects the material culture of cash to financial, political, and intellectual history. The book demonstrates that the shift from state-regulated banks and private shinplaster producers to federally authorized paper money in the Civil War era led to the erasure of the skill, knowledge, and lived experience with banking that informed debates over economic policy. The end result, Greenberg writes, has been a diminished public understanding of how currency and the financial sector operate in our contemporary era, from the 2008 recession to the rise of Bitcoin.
Download or read book Other People s Money written by Sharon Ann Murphy and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 to town. Stock certificates issued by turnpike or canal companies—worth something . . . or perhaps nothing. IOUs from farmers or tradesmen, passed around by people who could not know the person who first issued them. Money and banking in antebellum America offered a glaring example of free-market capitalism run amok—unregulated, exuberant, and heading pell-mell toward the next “panic” of burst bubbles and hard times. In Other People’s Money, Sharon Ann Murphy explains how banking and money worked before the federal government, spurred by the chaos of the Civil War, created the national system of US paper currency. Murphy traces the evolution of banking in America from the founding of the nation, when politicians debated the constitutionality of chartering a national bank, to Andrew Jackson’s role in the Bank War of the early 1830s, to the problems of financing a large-scale war. She reveals how, ultimately, the monetary and banking structures that emerged from the Civil War also provided the basis for our modern financial system, from its formation under the Federal Reserve in 1913 to the present. Touching on the significant role that numerous historical figures played in shaping American banking—including Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Louis Brandeis—Other People’s Money is an engaging guide to the heated political fights that surrounded banking in early America as well as to the economic causes and consequences of the financial system that emerged from the turmoil. By helping readers understand the financial history of this period and the way banking shaped the society in which ordinary Americans lived and worked, this book broadens and deepens our knowledge of the Early American Republic.
Download or read book The Federalist Frontier written by Kristopher Maulden and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Federalist Frontier traces the development of Federalist policies and the Federalist Party in the first three states of the Northwest Territory—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—from the nation’s first years until the rise of the Second Party System in the 1820s and 1830s. Relying on government records, private correspondence, and newspapers, Kristopher Maulden argues that Federalists originated many of the policies and institutions that helped the young United States government take a leading role in the American people’s expansion and settlement westward across the Appalachians. It was primarily they who placed the U.S. Army at the fore of the white westward movement, created and executed the institutions to survey and sell public lands, and advocated for transportation projects to aid commerce and further migration into the region. Ultimately, the relationship between government and settlers evolved as citizens raised their expectations of what the federal government should provide, and the region embraced transportation infrastructure and innovation in public education. Historians of early American politics will have a chance to read about Federalists in the Northwest, and they will see the early American state in action in fighting Indians, shaping settler understandings of space and social advancement, and influencing political ideals among the citizens. For historians of the early American West, Maulden’s work demonstrates that the origins of state-led expansion reach much further back in time than generally understood.
Download or read book Counterfeit Currency of the Confederate States of America written by George B. Tremmel and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2003 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since shortly after the end of the Civil War, genuine Confederate paper money has been the subject of much research. While a number of publications are available today that describe and catalog the genuine currency, the availability of published information on its counterfeit counterpart is limited. What is available is somewhat incomplete, inaccurate and general in scope. This work is specifically concerned with the counterfeit currency that was produced and passed with genuine Confederate paper money during the Civil War years. The first part of the book is an historical narrative that discusses the events and people involved in the production and passing of counterfeit currency, and the countermeasures of the Confederate Treasury Department to protect its already weak medium of exchange from losing even more value. The second part of the book is an illustrated catalog that presents descriptions of all known examples of counterfeit Confederate currency. Over 180 illustrations are included and show most of the counterfeit notes. The appendix provides a brief, nontechnical explanation of the printing processes--relief printing, intaglio printing, and lithography--used in the mid-nineteenth century to manufacture counterfeit currency.
Download or read book Nazis of Copley Square written by Charles Gallagher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forgotten history of American terrorists who, in the name of God, conspired to overthrow the government and formed an alliance with Hitler. On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes and offices of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar HooverÕs charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a Òtemporary dictatorshipÓ in order to stamp out Jewish and communist influence in the United States. Interviewed in his jail cell, the frontÕs ringleader was unbowed: ÒAll I can say isÑlong live Christ the King! Down with communism!Ó In Nazis of Copley Square, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves as crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, under assault from godless communism, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs. The front traced its origins to vibrant global Catholic theological movements of the early twentieth century, such as the Mystical Body of Christ and Catholic Action. The frontÕs anti-Semitism was inspired by Sunday sermons and by lay leaders openly espousing fascist and Nazi beliefs. Gallagher chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the mainstream political and religious leaders who shielded the frontÕs activities from scrutiny. Nazis of Copley Square offers a grim tale of faith perverted to violent ends, and its lessons provide a warning for those who hope to stop the spread of far-right violence today.
Download or read book Capitalism by Gaslight written by Brian P. Luskey and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-03-18 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While elite merchants, financiers, shopkeepers, and customers were the most visible producers, consumers, and distributors of goods and capital in the nineteenth century, they were certainly not alone in shaping the economy. Lurking in the shadows of capitalism's past are those who made markets by navigating a range of new financial instruments, information systems, and modes of transactions: prostitutes, dealers in used goods, mock auctioneers, illegal slavers, traffickers in stolen horses, emigrant runners, pilfering dock workers, and other ordinary people who, through their transactions and lives, helped to make capitalism as much as it made them. Capitalism by Gaslight illuminates American economic history by emphasizing the significance of these markets and the cultural debates they provoked. These essays reveal that the rules of economic engagement were still being established in the nineteenth century: delineations between legal and illegal, moral and immoral, acceptable and unsuitable were far from clear. The contributors examine the fluid mobility and unstable value of people and goods, the shifting geographies and structures of commercial institutions, the blurred boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity, and the daily lives of men and women who participated creatively—and often subversively—in American commerce. With subjects ranging from women's studies and African American history to material and consumer culture, this compelling volume illustrates that when hidden forms of commerce are brought to light, they can become flashpoints revealing the tensions, fissures, and inequities inherent in capitalism itself. Contributors: Paul Erickson, Robert J. Gamble, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Corey Goettsch, Joshua R. Greenberg, Katie M. Hemphill, Craig B. Hollander, Brian P. Luskey, Will B. Mackintosh, Adam Mendelsohn, Brendan P. O'Malley, Michael D. Thompson, Wendy A. Woloson.
Download or read book The Theory of Free Banking written by George A. Selgin and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 1988 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.
Download or read book Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures written by Tegan Kehoe and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Healthcare history is more than leeches and drilling holes in skulls. It is stories of scientific failures and triumphs. Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures presents a visual and narrative history of health and medicine in the United States, tracing paradigm shifts such as the introduction of anesthesia, the adoption of germ theory, and advances in public health. In this book, museum artifacts are windows into both famous and ordinary people’s experiences with healthcare throughout American history, from patent medicines and faith healing to laboratory science. With 50 vignette-like chapters and 50 color photographs, Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures showcases little-known objects that illustrate the complexities of our relationship with health, such as a bottle from the short period when the Schlitz beer company sold lager that was supposed to be high in vitamin D during the first vitamin craze. It also highlights famous moments in medicine, such as the discovery of penicillin, as illustrated by a mold-culturing pan. Each artifact tells some piece of the story of how its creators or users approached fundamental questions in health. Some of these questions are, “What causes sickness, and what causes health?” and “How much can everyone master the principles of health, and how much do laypeople need to rely on outside authorities?” Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures describes the days when surgeons worked on patients without anesthesia and wiped their scalpels on their coats, and the day that EMTs raced to provide help when the Twin Towers were attacked in 2001. The book discusses social and cultural influences that have shaped healthcare, providing insight relevant to today’s problems and colorful anecdotes along the way.
Download or read book State Banking Before the Civil War written by Davis Rich Dewey and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A History of Banking in All the Leading Nations written by and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Intimate Economy written by Alexandra J. Finley and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexandra Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self. Finley shows how women's work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets. Through the personal histories of four enslaved women, Finley explores the intangible costs of the slave market, moving beyond ledgers, bills of sales, and statements of profit and loss to consider the often incalculable but nevertheless invaluable place of women's emotional, sexual, and domestic labor in the economy. The details of these women's lives reveal the complex intersections of economy, race, and family at the heart of antebellum society.
Download or read book America s Bank written by Roger Lowenstein and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tour de force of historical reportage, America’s Bank illuminates the tumultuous era and remarkable personalities that spurred the unlikely birth of America’s modern central bank, the Federal Reserve. Today, the Fed is the bedrock of the financial landscape, yet the fight to create it was so protracted and divisive that it seems a small miracle that it was ever established. For nearly a century, America, alone among developed nations, refused to consider any central or organizing agency in its financial system. Americans’ mistrust of big government and of big banks—a legacy of the country’s Jeffersonian, small-government traditions—was so widespread that modernizing reform was deemed impossible. Each bank was left to stand on its own, with no central reserve or lender of last resort. The real-world consequences of this chaotic and provincial system were frequent financial panics, bank runs, money shortages, and depressions. By the first decade of the twentieth century, it had become plain that the outmoded banking system was ill equipped to finance America’s burgeoning industry. But political will for reform was lacking. It took an economic meltdown, a high-level tour of Europe, and—improbably—a conspiratorial effort by vilified captains of Wall Street to overcome popular resistance. Finally, in 1913, Congress conceived a federalist and quintessentially American solution to the conflict that had divided bankers, farmers, populists, and ordinary Americans, and enacted the landmark Federal Reserve Act. Roger Lowenstein—acclaimed financial journalist and bestselling author of When Genius Failed and The End of Wall Street—tells the drama-laden story of how America created the Federal Reserve, thereby taking its first steps onto the world stage as a global financial power. America’s Bank showcases Lowenstein at his very finest: illuminating complex financial and political issues with striking clarity, infusing the debates of our past with all the gripping immediacy of today, and painting unforgettable portraits of Gilded Age bankers, presidents, and politicians. Lowenstein focuses on the four men at the heart of the struggle to create the Federal Reserve. These were Paul Warburg, a refined, German-born financier, recently relocated to New York, who was horrified by the primitive condition of America’s finances; Rhode Island’s Nelson W. Aldrich, the reigning power broker in the U.S. Senate and an archetypal Gilded Age legislator; Carter Glass, the ambitious, if then little-known, Virginia congressman who chaired the House Banking Committee at a crucial moment of political transition; and President Woodrow Wilson, the academician-turned-progressive-politician who forced Glass to reconcile his deep-seated differences with bankers and accept the principle (anathema to southern Democrats) of federal control. Weaving together a raucous era in American politics with a storied financial crisis and intrigue at the highest levels of Washington and Wall Street, Lowenstein brings the beginnings of one of the country’s most crucial institutions to vivid and unforgettable life. Readers of this gripping historical narrative will wonder whether they’re reading about one hundred years ago or the still-seething conflicts that mark our discussions of banking and politics today.
Download or read book Sovereign Debt Diplomacies written by Pierre Penet and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Sovereign Debt Diplomacies aims to revisit the meaning of sovereign debt in relation to colonial history and postcolonial developments. It offers three main contributions. The first contribution is historical. The volume historicises a research field that has so far focused primarily on the post-1980 years. A focus on colonial debt from the 19th century building of colonial empires to the decolonisation era in the 1960s-70s fills an important gap in recent debt historiographies. Economic historians have engaged with colonialism only reluctantly or en passant, giving credence to the idea that colonialism is not a development that deserves to be treated on its own. This has led to suboptimal developments in recent scholarship. The second contribution adds a 'law and society' dimension to studies of debt. The analytical payoff of the exercise is to capture the current developments and functional limits of debt contracting and adjudication in relation to the long-term political and sociological dynamics of sovereignty. Finally, Sovereign Debt Diplomacies imports insights from, and contributes to the body of research currently developed in the Humanities under the label 'colonial and postcolonial studies'. The emphasis on 'history from below' and focus on 'subaltern agency' usefully complement the traditional elite-perspective on financial imperialism favoured by the British school of empire history.
Download or read book Bank Notes and Shinplasters written by Joshua R. Greenberg and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The colorful history of paper money before the Civil War Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. This number does not even include the plethora of counterfeit bills and the countless shinplasters of questionable legality issued by unregulated merchants, firms, and municipalities. Adding to the chaos was the idiosyncratic method for negotiating their value, an often manipulative face-to-face discussion consciously separated from any haggling over the price of the work, goods, or services for sale. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how ordinary Americans accumulated and wielded the financial knowledge required to navigate interpersonal bank note transactions. Locating evidence of Americans grappling with their money in fiction, correspondence, newspapers, printed ephemera, government documents, legal cases, and even on the money itself, Greenberg argues Americans, by necessity, developed the ability to analyze the value of paper financial instruments, assess the strength of banking institutions, and even track legislative changes that might alter the rules of currency circulation. In his examination of the doodles, calculations, political screeds, and commercial stamps that ended up on bank bills, he connects the material culture of cash to financial, political, and intellectual history. The book demonstrates that the shift from state-regulated banks and private shinplaster producers to federally authorized paper money in the Civil War era led to the erasure of the skill, knowledge, and lived experience with banking that informed debates over economic policy. The end result, Greenberg writes, has been a diminished public understanding of how currency and the financial sector operate in our contemporary era, from the 2008 recession to the rise of Bitcoin.
Download or read book Blood Ivy written by Paul Collins and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delectable true-crime story of scandal and murder at America’s most celebrated university. On November 23rd of 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city’s richest men simply vanished. Dr. George Parkman, a Brahmin who owned much of Boston’s West End, was last seen that afternoon visiting his alma mater, Harvard Medical School. Police scoured city tenements and the harbor, and offered hefty rewards as leads put the elusive Dr. Parkman at sea or hiding in Manhattan. But one Harvard janitor held a much darker suspicion: that their ruthless benefactor had never left the Medical School building alive. His shocking discoveries in a chemistry professor’s laboratory engulfed America in one of its most infamous trials: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. John White Webster. A baffling case of red herrings, grave robbery, and dismemberment—of Harvard’s greatest doctors investigating one of their own, for a murder hidden in a building full of cadavers—it became a landmark case in the use of medical forensics and the meaning of reasonable doubt. Paul Collins brings nineteenth-century Boston back to life in vivid detail, weaving together newspaper accounts, letters, journals, court transcripts, and memoirs from this groundbreaking case. Rich in characters and evocative in atmosphere, Blood & Ivy explores the fatal entanglement of new science and old money in one of America’s greatest murder mysteries.
Download or read book Southern Scoundrels written by Jeff Forret and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of capitalist development in the United States is long, uneven, and overwhelmingly focused on the North. Macroeconomic studies of the South have primarily emphasized the role of the cotton economy in global trading networks. Until now, few in-depth scholarly works have attempted to explain how capitalism in the South took root and functioned in all of its diverse—and duplicitous—forms. Southern Scoundrels explores the lesser-known aspects of the emergence of capitalism in the region: the shady and unscrupulous peddlers, preachers, slave traders, war profiteers, thieves, and marginal men who seized available opportunities to get ahead and, in doing so, left their mark on the southern economy. Eschewing conventional economic theory, this volume features narrative storytelling as engaging and seductive as the cast of shifty characters under examination. Contributors cover the chronological sweep of the nineteenth-century South, from the antebellum era through the tumultuous and chaotic Civil War years, and into Reconstruction and beyond. The geographic scope is equally broad, with essays encompassing the Chesapeake, South Carolina, the Lower Mississippi Valley, Texas, Missouri, and Appalachia. These essays offer a series of social histories on the nineteenth-century southern economy and the changes wrought by capitalist transformation. Tracing that story through the kinds of oily individuals who made it happen, Southern Scoundrels provides fascinating insights into the region’s hucksters and its history. Contents Introduction, Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker “Preachers and Peddlers: Credit and Belief in the Flush Times,” John Lindbeck “A Gentleman and a Scoundrel? Alexander McDonald, Financial Reputation, and Slavery’s Capitalism,” Alexandra J. Finley “‘How Deeply They Weed into the Pockets’: Slave Traders, Bank Speculators, and the Anatomy of a Chesapeake Wildcat, 1840–1843,” Jeff Forret “Bernard Kendig: Orchestrating Fraud in the Market and the Courtroom,” Maria R. Montalvo “William A. Britton v. Benjamin F. Butler: Occupied New Orleans, Confiscation, and the Disruption of the Cotton Trade in Wartime Natchez,” Jeff Strickland “Devils at the Doorstep: Confederate Judges, Masters of Sequestration,” Rodney J. Steward “‘Irresistibly Impelled toward Illegal Appropriation’: The Civil War Schemes of William G. Cheeney,” Jimmy L. Bryan, Jr. “Das Kapital on Tchoupitoulas Street: The Marketing of Stolen Goods and the Reserve Army of Labor in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans,” Bruce E. Baker “The Violent Lives of William Faucett,” Elaine S. Frantz “Eureka! Law and Order for Sale in Gilded Age Appalachia,” T. R. C. Hutton
Download or read book Old time New England written by and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
