Between 1819 and 2008, the United States has experienced six major panics - periods when stock market crashes coincided with bank failures. This seminar will examine historical explanations for these panics as well as their political, social, and cultural legacies. The panic of 1819 for example, helped bring about the first popular party system. Nearly twenty years later, a panic in 1837 destroyed the Melville family fortune, pushing the young author Herman into a life at sea. And the Panic of 1873, begun with a mortgage meltdown in Vienna, helped a new kind of fundamentalist Christianity to emerge in the US.
Seminar led by Scott Nelson, College of William and Mary