Introduction: Imagining a Confederate economy -- Shifting cultivation, slavery, and economic development -- Agricultural reform and state activism -- Explaining Lieber's paradox : railroads, state building, and slavery -- Redefining free trade to modernize the South -- Economic nationalism and...

What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the...

The years 1800-1830 are sometimes designated the turnpike era, since in the 1830's canals and railroads began eclipsing the old wagon roads. Thereafter, long distance travel went by water and rail, but the journey often began on one of the many short toll roads feeding the system. This paper...

The new roads would end rural isolation, speed commerce, improve wives and daughters, increase church attendance, bring wealth to investors. So said the promotors. The autors examine the New York origins of plank roads and analyze their giddy rise and traumatic decline. Daniel Klein is an...

From 1847 to 1853 New Yorkers built more than 3,500 miles of wooden roads. Financed primarily by residents of declining rural townships, plank roads were seen as a means of linking isolated areas to the canal and railroad network. A broad range of individuals invested in the roads, suggesting...