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E-book
Author Hogeland, William.

Title Founding finance : how debt, speculation, foreclosures, protests, and crackdowns made us a nation / William Hogeland
Edition First edition
Published Austin : University of Texas Press, 2012

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 274 pages) : illustrations
Series Discovering America ; [5]
Discovering America series ; 5.
Contents The founders, finance, and us -- Riot, regulate, occupy (1765/1771) -- Two revolutions? (1771/1776) -- Conceived in war debt (1776/1783) -- History on the verge of a nervous breakdown (1913/2012) -- An existential interpretation of the constitution of the United States (1783/1789) -- It's Hamilton's America -- : we just live in it (1789/1791) -- Crackdown and lockup : Cincinnatus, the whiskey rebels, and the end of Thomas Paine (1791/) -- Gather your armies -- Acknowledgments -- Bibliographic essays -- References -- Index
Summary Recent movements such as the Tea Party and anti-tax "constitutional conservatism" lay claim to the finance and taxation ideas of America's founders, but how much do we really know about the dramatic clashes over finance and economics that marked the founding of America? Dissenting from both right-wing claims and certain liberal preconceptions, Founding Finance brings to life the violent conflicts over economics, class, and finance that played directly, and in many ways ironically, into the hardball politics of forming the nation and ratifying the Constitution--conflicts that still continue to affect our politics, legislation, and debate today. Mixing lively narrative with fresh views of America's founders, William Hogeland offers a new perspective on America's economic infancy: foreclosure crises that make our current one look mild; investment bubbles in land and securities that drove rich men to high-risk borrowing and mad displays of ostentation before dropping them into debtors' prisons; depressions longer and deeper than the great one of the twentieth century; crony mercantilism, war profiteering, and government corruption that undermine any nostalgia for a virtuous early republic; and predatory lending of scarce cash at exorbitant, unregulated rates, which forced people into bankruptcy, landlessness, and working in the factories and on the commercial farms of their creditors. This story exposes and corrects a perpetual historical denial--by movements across the political spectrum--of America's all-important founding economic clashes, a denial that weakens and cheapens public discourse on American finance just when we need it most
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-261) and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject United States. Constitutional Convention (1787)
SUBJECT Constitutional Convention (United States : 1787) fast
Subject Finance, Public -- United States -- History -- 1789-1801.
Debts, Public -- United States -- History -- 1789-1801
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Public Finance.
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / General
Debts, Public
Finance, Public
Politics and government
SUBJECT United States -- Politics and government -- 1789-1797. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140417
Subject United States
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2012023318
ISBN 0292744501
9780292744509