The 1850s witnessed one of the earliest American history. During the decade the proportion of individuals receiving public assistance -- increased from 5.8 in 1850 to 10.2 in 1860, an increase of 76 percent. Previous attempts to explain the increase in antebellum pauperism have been hampered by...

This paper uses newly collected archival evidence to examine various aspects of the geographic performance of American labor markets before the Civil War. Much of the paper addresses the evolution of regional differences in real wages, of interest to economic historians because they speak to the...

This paper replicates a classic study of the American business elite. The older study done a half-century ago, reported the composition of business leaders a century ago. I have" drawn a sample of business leaders today to discover how much the composition of the" American business elite has...

This history of the Great Depression was prepared for The Cambridge Economic History of the United States. It describes real and imagined causes of the Depression, bank failures and deflation, the Fed and the gold standard, the start of recovery, the first New Deal, and the second New Deal. I...

This paper surveys recent research on the labor force in the nineteenth century. I examine trends in the aggregate size, demographic, occupational and industrial composition of the labor force; short-run and long-run movements in nominal and real wages; hours of work; the development of the...

There are two views of the British Industrial Revolution in the literature today. The more traditional description, represented by the views of Ashton and Landes, sees the Industrial Revolution as a broad change in the British economy and society. This broad view of the Industrial Revolution has...

Why did international capital flows rise to such heights in the late 19th century, the years between 1907 and 1913 in particular? Britain placed half of her annual savings abroad during those seven years, and 76 percent of it went to the New World countries of Canada, Australia, the USA,...