In the mid-nineteenth century, American wholesalers began increasingly to rely on credit-reporting agencies to provide information about customers in distant localities. The demand for dependable information, coupled with the dynamism and competitiveness of the American market, helped usher into...

Ann Smart Martin examines two counties in backcountry Virginia, part of the “shifting edge” of the British Empire in the eighteenth century. She asks how and why the residents of those counties bought into the world of consumer goods. In answering the how, Martin builds on works by Jacob...

Features a review of the book "A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States" by Stephen Mihm.