U.S. Economic History: From Colonial Times to the Civil War

Examination of the development of the U.S. economy up to and including the Civil War. Focus on using economic models and numbers to understand what drove the evolution of the economy, why structural changes occurred, and why there was persistence. While the past persists for a long time in the form of people and institutions, there are periods of dramatic change brought on by technological change and by war. Study of the past, with its very different institutions, to inform the present. For example, there was no U.S. currency until the Civil War. Each bank printed its own notes and each state had different banking regulations. Investigation of how the system worked, whether it was effective in allocating capital, and how stability depended on banking regulations.

P/NP or letter grading.