Download or read book Financial Founding Fathers written by Robert E. Wright and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-05 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors chronicle how a different group of nine founding fathers forged the wealth and institutions necessary to transform the American colonies from a diffuse alliance of contending business interests into one cohesive economic superpower.
Download or read book Financial Founding Fathers written by Robert E. Wright and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-02 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When you think of the founding fathers, you think of men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—exceptional minds and matchless statesmen who led the colonies to a seemingly impossible victory over the British and established the constitutional and legal framework for our democratic government. But the American Revolution was about far more than freedom and liberty. It was about economics as well. Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen here chronicle how a different group of founding fathers forged the wealth and institutions necessary to transform the American colonies from a diffuse alliance of contending business interests into one cohesive economic superpower. From Alexander Hamilton to Andrew Jackson, the authors focus on the lives of nine Americans in particular—some famous, some unknown, others misunderstood, but all among our nation’s financial founding fathers. Such men were instrumental in creating and nurturing a financial system that drove economic growth in the nascent United States because they were quick to realize that wealth was as crucial as the Constitution in securing the blessings of liberty and promoting the general welfare. The astonishing economic development made possible by our financial founding fathers was indispensable to the preservation of national unity and of support for a government that was then still a profoundly radical and delicate political experiment. Grand in scope and vision, Financial Founding Fathers is an entertaining and inspiring history of the men who made America rich and steered her toward greatness.
Download or read book Financial Founding Fathers written by Robert E. Wright and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When you think of the founding fathers, you think of men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—exceptional minds and matchless statesmen who led the colonies to a seemingly impossible victory over the British and established the constitutional and legal framework for our democratic government. But the American Revolution was about far more than freedom and liberty. It was about economics as well. Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen here chronicle how a different group of founding fathers forged the wealth and institutions necessary to transform the American colonies from a diffuse alliance of contending business interests into one cohesive economic superpower. From Alexander Hamilton to Andrew Jackson, the authors focus on the lives of nine Americans in particular—some famous, some unknown, others misunderstood, but all among our nation’s financial founding fathers. Such men were instrumental in creating and nurturing a financial system that drove economic growth in the nascent United States because they were quick to realize that wealth was as crucial as the Constitution in securing the blessings of liberty and promoting the general welfare. The astonishing economic development made possible by our financial founding fathers was indispensable to the preservation of national unity and of support for a government that was then still a profoundly radical and delicate political experiment. Grand in scope and vision, Financial Founding Fathers is an entertaining and inspiring history of the men who made America rich and steered her toward greatness.
Download or read book Alexander Hamilton on Finance Credit and Debt written by Richard Sylla and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A treasure trove for financial and public policy geeks . . . will also help lay readers go beyond the hit musical in understanding Hamilton’s lasting significance.” —Publishers Weekly While serving as the first treasury secretary from 1789 to 1795, Alexander Hamilton engineered a financial revolution. He established the treasury debt market, the dollar, and a central bank, while strategically prompting private entrepreneurs to establish securities markets and stock exchanges and encouraging state governments to charter a number of commercial banks and other business corporations. Yet despite a recent surge of interest in Hamilton, US financial modernization has not been fully recognized as one of his greatest achievements. This book traces the development of Hamilton’s financial thinking, policies, and actions through a selection of his writings. Financial historians and Hamilton experts Richard Sylla and David J. Cowen provide commentary that demonstrates the impact Hamilton had on the modern economic system, guiding readers through Hamilton’s distinguished career. It showcases Hamilton’s thoughts on the nation’s founding, the need for a strong central government, problems such as a depreciating paper currency and weak public credit, and the architecture of the financial system. His great state papers on public credit, the national bank, the mint, and manufactures instructed reform of the nation’s finances and jumpstarted economic growth. Hamilton practiced what he preached: he played a key role in the founding of three banks and a manufacturing corporation—and his deft political maneuvering and economic savvy saved the fledgling republic’s economy during the country’s first full-blown financial crisis in 1792. “A fascinating examination of Hamiltonian economics.” —The Washington Times
Download or read book The Founders Fortunes written by Willard Sterne Randall and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating financial history of the Founding Fathers, revealing how their personal finances shaped the Constitution and the new nation In 1776, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers concluded America’s most consequential document with a curious note, pledging “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” Lives and honor did indeed hang in the balance, yet just what were their fortunes? How much did the Founders stand to gain or lose through independence? And what lingering consequences did their respective financial stakes have on liberty, justice, and the fate of the fledgling United States of America? In this landmark account, historian Willard Sterne Randall investigates the private financial affairs of the Founders, illuminating like never before how and why the Revolution came about. The Founders’ Fortunes uncovers how these leaders waged war, crafted a constitution, and forged a new nation influenced in part by their own financial interests. In an era where these very issues have become daily national questions, the result is a remarkable and insightful new understanding of our nation’s bedrock values.
Download or read book The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers written by Thomas Fleming and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-14 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling, intimate look at the founders—George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison—and the women who played essential roles in their lives With his usual storytelling flair and unparalleled research, Tom Fleming examines the women who were at the center of the lives of the founding fathers. From hot-tempered Mary Ball Washington to promiscuous Rachel Lavien Hamilton, the founding fathers' mothers powerfully shaped their sons' visions of domestic life. But lovers and wives played more critical roles as friends and often partners in fame. We learn of the youthful Washington's tortured love for the coquettish Sarah Fairfax, wife of his close friend; of Franklin's two "wives," one in London and one in Philadelphia; of Adams's long absences, which required a lonely, deeply unhappy Abigail to keep home and family together for years on end; of Hamilton's adulterous betrayal of his wife and then their reconciliation; of how the brilliant Madison was jilted by a flirtatious fifteen-year-old and went on to marry the effervescent Dolley, who helped make this shy man into a popular president. Jefferson's controversial relationship to Sally Hemings is also examined, with a different vision of where his heart lay. Fleming nimbly takes us through a great deal of early American history, as his founding fathers strove to reconcile the private and public, often beset by a media every bit as gossip seeking and inflammatory as ours today. He offers a powerful look at the challenges women faced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While often brilliant and articulate, the wives of the founding fathers all struggled with the distractions and dangers of frequent childbearing and searing anxiety about infant mortality—Jefferson's wife, Martha, died from complications following labor, as did his daughter. All the more remarkable, then, that these women loomed so large in the lives of their husbands—and, in some cases, their country.
Download or read book One Nation Under Debt Hamilton Jefferson and the History of What We Owe written by Robert E. Wright and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2008-05-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like its current citizens, the United States was born in debt-a debt so deep that it threatened to destroy the young nation. Thomas Jefferson considered the national debt a monstrous fraud on posterity, while Alexander Hamilton believed debt would help America prosper. Both, as it turns out, were right. One Nation Under Debt explores the untold history of America's first national debt, which arose from the immense sums needed to conduct the American Revolution. Noted economic historian Robert Wright, Ph.D. tells in riveting narrative how a subjugated but enlightened people cast off a great tyrant-“but their liberty, won with promises as well as with the blood of patriots, came at a high price.” He brings to life the key events that shaped the U.S. financial system and explains how the actions of our forefathers laid the groundwork for the debt we still carry today. As an economically tenuous nation by Revolution's end, America's people struggled to get on their feet. Wright outlines how the formation of a new government originally reduced the nation's debt-but, as debt was critical to this government's survival, it resurfaced, to be beaten back once more. Wright then reveals how political leaders began accumulating massive new debts to ensure their popularity, setting the financial stage for decades to come. Wright traces critical evolutionary developments-from Alexander Hamilton's creation of the nation's first modern capital market, to the use of national bonds to further financial goals, to the drafting of state constitutions that created non-predatory governments. He shows how, by the end of Andrew Jackson's administration, America's financial system was contributing to national growth while at the same time new national and state debts were amassing, sealing the fate for future generations.
Download or read book Founding Finance written by William Hogeland and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Whiskey Rebellion “dig[s] beneath history’s surface and note[s] both the populist and anti-populist dimensions of the nation’s founding” (Library Journal). Recent movements such as the Tea Party and anti-tax “constitutional conservatism” lay claim to the finance and taxation ideas of America’s founders, but how much do we really know about the dramatic clashes over finance and economics that marked the founding of America? Dissenting from both right-wing claims and certain liberal preconceptions, Founding Finance brings to life the violent conflicts over economics, class, and finance that played directly, and in many ways ironically, into the hardball politics of forming the nation and ratifying the Constitution—conflicts that still continue to affect our politics, legislation, and debate today. Mixing lively narrative with fresh views of America’s founders, William Hogeland offers a new perspective on America’s economic infancy: foreclosure crises that make our current one look mild; investment bubbles in land and securities that drove rich men to high-risk borrowing and mad displays of ostentation before dropping them into debtors’ prisons; depressions longer and deeper than the great one of the twentieth century; crony mercantilism, war profiteering, and government corruption that undermine any nostalgia for a virtuous early republic; and predatory lending of scarce cash at exorbitant, unregulated rates, which forced people into bankruptcy, landlessness, and working in the factories and on the commercial farms of their creditors. This story exposes and corrects a perpetual historical denial—by movements across the political spectrum—of America’s all-important founding economic clashes, a denial that weakens and cheapens public discourse on American finance just when we need it most.
Download or read book Founding Choices written by Douglas A. Irwin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers of the National Bureau of Economic Research conference held at Dartmouth College on May 8-9, 2009.
Download or read book Founding Brothers written by Joseph J. Ellis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2002-02-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A landmark work of history explores how a group of greatly gifted but deeply flawed individuals—Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madison—confronted the overwhelming challenges before them to set the course for our nation. “A splendid book—humane, learned, written with flair and radiant with a calm intelligence and wit.” —The New York Times Book Review The United States was more a fragile hope than a reality in 1790. During the decade that followed, the Founding Fathers—re-examined here as Founding Brothers—combined the ideals of the Declaration of Independence with the content of the Constitution to create the practical workings of our government. Through an analysis of six fascinating episodes—Hamilton and Burr’s deadly duel, Washington’s precedent-setting Farewell Address, Adams’ administration and political partnership with his wife, the debate about where to place the capital, Franklin’s attempt to force Congress to confront the issue of slavery and Madison’s attempts to block him, and Jefferson and Adams’ famous correspondence—Founding Brothers brings to life the vital issues and personalities from the most important decade in our nation’s history.
Download or read book American Connections written by James Burke and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-07-03 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the unique approach that he has employed in his previous books, author, columnist, and television commentator James Burke shows us our connections to the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Over the two hundred-plus years that separate us, these connections are often surprising and always fascinating. Burke turns the signers from historical icons into flesh-and-blood people: Some were shady financial manipulators, most were masterful political operators, a few were good human beings, and some were great men. The network that links them to us is also peopled by all sorts, from spies and assassins to lovers and adulterers, inventors and artists. The ties may be more direct for some of us than others, but we are all linked in some way to these founders of our nation. If you enjoyed Martin Sheen as the president on television's The West Wing, then you're connected to founder Josiah Bartlett. The connection from signer Bartlett to Sheen includes John Paul Jones; Judge William Cooper, father of James Fenimore; Sir Thomas Brisbane, governor of New South Wales; an incestuous astronomer; an itinerant math teacher; early inventors of television; and pioneering TV personality Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the inspiration for Ramon Estevez's screen name, Martin Sheen.
Download or read book Gallatin written by Nicholas Dungan and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the life of statesman Albert Gallatin and discusses his role in the formation of the United States.
Download or read book The Last Founding Father written by Harlow Giles Unger and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author, the larger than life story of America's fifth president, who transformed a small, fragile nation into a powerful empire In this compelling biography, award-winning author Harlow Giles Unger reveals the epic story of James Monroe (1758-1831)-the last of America's Founding Fathers-who transformed a small, fragile nation beset by enemies into a powerful empire stretching "from sea to shining sea." Like David McCullough's John Adams and Jon Meacham's American Lion, The Last Founding Father is both a superb read and stellar scholarship-action-filled history in the grand tradition.
Download or read book Jefferson and Hamilton written by John Ferling and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's foremost historians brilliantly brings to life the fierce struggle - both public and, ultimately, bitterly personal - between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton - two rivals whose opposing visions of what the United States should be continue to shape our country to this day.
Download or read book The Founders and Finance written by Thomas K. McCraw and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1776 the United States government started out on a shoestring and quickly went bankrupt fighting its War of Independence against Britain. At the war’s end, the national government owed tremendous sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens. But lacking the power to tax, it had no means to repay them. The Founders and Finance is the first book to tell the story of how foreign-born financial specialists—immigrants—solved the fiscal crisis and set the United States on a path to long-term economic success. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas K. McCraw analyzes the skills and worldliness of Alexander Hamilton (from the Danish Virgin Islands), Albert Gallatin (from the Republic of Geneva), and other immigrant founders who guided the nation to prosperity. Their expertise with liquid capital far exceeded that of native-born plantation owners Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, who well understood the management of land and slaves but had only a vague knowledge of financial instruments—currencies, stocks, and bonds. The very rootlessness of America’s immigrant leaders gave them a better understanding of money, credit, and banks, and the way each could be made to serve the public good. The remarkable financial innovations designed by Hamilton, Gallatin, and other immigrants enabled the United States to control its debts, to pay for the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and—barely—to fight the War of 1812, which preserved the nation’s hard-won independence from Britain.
Download or read book Founding Father written by Richard Brookhiser and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-02-22 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Revisits the spectacular career of George Washington, at once our most familiar and enigmatic president. Challenging the modern perceptions of Washington as either a political figurehead of little actual importance or a folk legend rather than a real man, Brookhiser traces the president's amazing accomplishments as a statesman, soldier, and founder of a great nation in a quarter century of activity that remains unmatched by any modern leader. Brookhiser goes on to examine Washington's education, ideals, and intellectual curiosity, illuminating how Washington's character and values shaped the beginnings of American politics."--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book The Founding Fathers written by Richard B. Bernstein and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a concise contribution to the 'Very Short Introductions' series which reintroduces the history that shaped the founding fathers, the history that they made, and what history has made of them.
