Despite a roaring market, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects there will be fewer jobs for the bottom 40 percent of workers in the lowest paying jobs by 2029. The top quintile? Boom times. Over half of Americans are now living in what for them is essentially a Great Depression. This kind of economic … Continued
The Great Depression confronts teachers and students of history with some classic challenges of historical analysis. How does one disentangle proximate and deeper causes of this calamitous economic collapse? How did historical protagonists make sense of the course of epochal events that so rapidly transformed their worlds? To what extent should we characterize the onset … Continued
The men and women of the American Revolution were united as consumers before they came together as rebels. Through the mid-1700s, as the wealth of the colonies increased, Americans from Portsmouth to Savannah bought the same imported goods. Their shared desire for and dependence upon British cloth, ceramics, tea, and other items created a common … Continued
Instead of “what caused the Great Depression,” we devote our attention to “what made the Great Depression ‘great'”? There are three key elements of this problem: 1) the failure of wages to keep pace with productive capacity; 2) the failure of trade policy to keep pace with economic change; and 3) the absence of a … Continued
“The chief business of the American people is business.” President Calvin Coolidge said those oft-quoted words in a speech to newspaper editors in 1925. Coolidge and many others went much further, claiming that business was nothing less than America’s religion. “Through business, properly conceived, managed, and conducted” wrote efficiency expert Edward E. Purinton in 1921, … Continued
In the decades after the Civil War the growth of urban markets, the creation of an efficient distribution system, the development of a highly motivated work force, and the availability of vast amounts of capital transformed the agricultural, craft-centered economy of the United States into a modern industrial powerhouse. But with this growth came instability. … Continued
Between 1845 and 1848 the United States acquired 1.2 million square miles of western territory. This expansion aggravated old tensions between the North and the South over the institution of slavery, and those tensions eventually tore the nation apart. But when the War ended, the United States found itself transformed. Not only was it united … Continued
What is money and where does it come from? If asked, most people would likely respond to these questions by pointing to the notes and coins in their pockets—or maybe their debit and charge cards—and muse on some connection between the “government” and printed money. Concerning origins, most would probably add that money developed more … Continued
My humanities moment came with my conversion from Islam to Christianity. It opened a wide world for me and enabled me to see that my new faith was distinct, but shared some of its humanistic values which we find in religious traditions around the world. I began to see areas of difference and convergence with … Continued
We tend to think of money as a familiar object that plays a role in our everyday lives. However, when we consider the changing nature of currency in colonial America, money appears differently—as a “social technology for the distribution of value.” Because money allows individuals to represent and share value in direct and visible ways, the use of paper money in the United States in the eighteenth century supplemented social connections and bolstered economic consumption. In this podcast, historian Simon Middleton from the College of William & Mary discusses how his work examines the cultural, legal, and social dimensions of money.