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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 Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and unprecedented book, the centrality of enslaved labor to banking in the antebellum United States is far greater than previously thought. Banking on Slavery sheds light on precisely how the financial relationships between banks and slaveholders worked across the nineteenth-century South. Murphy argues that the rapid spread of slavery in the South during the 1820s and ’30s depended significantly upon southern banks’ willingness to financialize enslaved lives, with the use of enslaved individuals as loan collateral proving central to these financial relationships. She makes clear how southern banks were ready—and, in some cases, even eager—to alter time-honored banking practices to meet the needs of slaveholders. In the end, many of these banks sacrificed themselves in their efforts to stabilize the slave economy. Murphy also details how banks and slaveholders transformed enslaved lives from physical bodies into abstract capital assets. Her book provides an essential examination of how our nation’s financial history is more intimately intertwined with the dehumanizing institution of slavery than scholars have previously thought.

Banks and banking --- Slavery --- History --- Economic aspects --- slavery, slaveholders, slave economy, frontier South, banks, bankers, loan collateral, financialization, antebellum.

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What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property’s ontology. Chad Luck argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with precisely these questions. Reading slave narratives, gothic romances, city-mystery novels, and a range of other property narratives, Luck unearths a wide-ranging literary effort to understand the nature of ownership, the phenomenology of possession. In these antebellum texts, ownership is not an abstract legal form but a lived relation, a dynamic of embodiment emerging within specific cultural spaces—a disputed frontier, a city agitated by class conflict. Luck challenges accounts that map property practice along a trajectory of abstraction and “virtualization.” The book also reorients recent Americanist work in emotion and affect by detailing a broader phenomenology of ownership, one extending beyond emotion to such sensory experiences as touch, taste, and vision. This productive blend of phenomenology and history uncovers deep-seated anxieties—and enthusiasms—about property across antebellum culture.

American fiction --- Material culture in literature. --- Property in literature. --- Personal belongings in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Affect. --- American Literature. --- Antebellum Culture. --- Eighteenth-Century. --- Embodiment. --- Nineteenth-Century. --- Ownership. --- Phenomenology. --- Property. --- Space.

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In Pursuit of Leviathan traces the American whaling industry from its rise in the 1840's to its precipitous fall at the end of the nineteenth century. Using detailed and comprehensive data that describe more than four thousand whaling voyages from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the leading nineteenth-century whaling port, the authors explore the market for whale products, crew quality and labor contracts, and whale biology and distribution, and assess the productivity of the American fleet. They then examine new whaling techniques developed at the end of the nineteenth century, such as modified clippers and harpoons, and the introduction of darting guns. Despite the common belief that the whaling industry declined due to a fall in whale stocks, the authors argue that the industry's collapse was related to changes in technology and market conditions. Providing a wealth of historical information, In Pursuit of Leviathan is a classic industry study that will provide intriguing reading for anyone interested in the history of whaling.

Whaling --- Economic aspects --- History --- Commercial whaling --- Hunting, Whale --- Whale fisheries --- Whale hunting --- Fisheries --- E-books --- whaling, history, economics, voyages, new bedford, massachusetts, ports, labor, products, commerce, innovation, whale biology, productivity, technology, clippers, harpoons, darting guns, nonfiction, profits, blubber, ambergris, market forces, crew, sailors, fleet, 19th century, antebellum, eastern seaboard, natural resources, capital.

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Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world's dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry. In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, Knowles reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel. Richly illustrated with dozens of original maps and period art work, all in full color, Mastering Iron sheds new light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.

Iron industry and trade --- History. --- industrialization, factory, iron, ironworks, industry, civil war, alabama, maryland, massachusetts, metals, pennsylvania, virginia, technology, steel, manufacturing, business, history, nonfiction, labor, geography, economy, production, wales, welsh, immigrants, england, great britain, competition, antebellum, weather, climate, natural resources, mining, slavery, earth sciences. --- History

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Many of us may not realize that what we now call snail mail was once just as revolutionary as e-mail and text messages are today. As David M. Henkin argues in The Postal Age, a burgeoning postal network initiated major cultural shifts during the nineteenth century, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications. This fascinating history traces these shifts from their beginnings in the mid-1800s, when cheaper postage, mass literacy, and migration combined to make the long-established postal service a more integral and viable part

Communication. --- Postal service. --- Business. --- Postal service --- Communication --- Transportation Economics --- Business & Economics --- History --- Social aspects --- Mail --- Mail service --- Post-office --- Carriers --- Communication and traffic --- Transportation --- communication, social change, post office, letters, correspondance, postal network, telecommunications, postage, literacy, migration, civil war, gold rush, immigration, race, poverty, junk mail, valentines, antebellum, history, nonfiction, news, urban, family, mass mailing, information, intimacy, connection, distance, pioneers, american west, frontier, labor, travel, relocation, homestead.