Trace the transformation of the American economy from the Civil War through 1921 by examining wartime finance, banking panics, industrial development, regulation, living standards, and federal intervention.
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Analyze how slavery, tariffs, banking privileges, constitutional disputes, and competing ideas of market exchange and state power contributed to sectional conflict.
Explain how wartime taxation, debt, monetary expansion, conscription, confiscation, and industrial controls altered economic life and enlarged federal institutions.
Compare the panics of 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, and 1907 through their credit booms, reserve pressures, interventions, liquidation, and recoveries.
Assess how saving, entrepreneurship, financial markets, migration, land use, technological innovation, and changing employment contributed to capital formation and higher living standards.
Trace how political movements, business-government cooperation, railroad regulation, antitrust enforcement, welfare initiatives, and fiscal policy helped construct the regulatory state.
Evaluate how First World War mobilization and finance shaped the postwar boom, monetary contraction, price declines, fiscal retrenchment, and recovery of 1920–21.
American Economic History, Part II examines how markets, political power, and financial institutions shaped the United States from the sectional crisis through the Depression of 1920–21. The course begins with slavery, tariffs, banking privileges, wartime mobilization, Republican political economy, and the economic consequences of the War Between the States. It then follows the National Banking System through monetary expansion, international capital flows, recurring panics, liquidation, and the campaign that culminated in the Federal Reserve. A broader study of industrial society considers fiscal policy, regulation, labor and migration, land use, capital accumulation, technological change, and rising standards of living. The final lessons show how the First World War expanded federal control over production, labor, finance, taxation, and debt, before tracing the inflation, contraction, fiscal retrenchment, and recovery surrounding the Depression of 1920–21.
Chair and Professor of Economics · Grove City College
Jeffrey M. Herbener is an economist and scholar of the Austrian school whose research addresses money, business cycles, capital, interest, and economic history.
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