Series: American Beginnings, 1500-1900

A fascinating historical account of a largely forgotten statesman, who pioneered a form of patriotism that left an indelible mark on the early United States. Joel Roberts Poinsett’s (1779–1851) brand of self-interested patriotism illuminates the paradoxes of the antebellum United States. He was a South Carolina investor and enslaver, a confidant of Andrew Jackson, and a secret agent in South...

A Great and Rising Nation illuminates the unexplored early decades of the United States’ imperialist naval aspirations. Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage, with an international presence rooted in commerce rather than military might. Michael A. Verney’s A Great and Rising Nation flips this notion...

Explores the origin and evolution of American public finance and shows how the nation’s rise to great-power status in the nineteenth century rested on its ability to go into debt. Two and a half centuries after the American Revolution, the United States stands as one of the greatest powers on earth and the undoubted leader of the western hemisphere. This...

A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery. It’s now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It’s also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with—and often profited from—slavery’s perpetuation. Yet as...

As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because—to speak bluntly—it...

An incisive account of the crucial role money played in the formation and development of British North America. Promise to Pay follows America's first paper money—the "bills of credit" of British North America—from its seventeenth-century origins as a means of war finance to its pivotal role in catalysing the American Revolution. Katie A. Moore combs through treasury records, account books,...