We study the decisions of state-chartered banks to join the Fed in its first decade. Ours is the first study to combine state regulatory environment characteristics and individual bank characteristics to explain Fed membership choice. Regulatory environments that reduced the benefit of discount window access or increased the regulatory cost of joining the Fed led to fewer banks joining. Individual bank characteristics that affected the magnitude of benefits from accessing the discount window (either passing on liquidity risk reduction to respondents or reducing the member bank’s own seasonal liquidity risk) were even more important in determining which banks joined.

I believe that, through the Federal Reserve Banks, … the better shall we be equipped to cope with the problems ahead of us, of helping ourselves and of helping the world; I believe it to be the duty of every bank in the country to contribute its share in equipping our nation for this task; … I firmly believe that the future will belong to those banks—national or state—that are members of the Federal Reserve System.

—Paul Warburg, Speech at the New York State Bankers’ Association Convention, 9 June 1916

We economic historians can sympathize fully with Professor Gerhard in his search for criteria that will help to cut political history into meaningful periods. Like him, we are fully aware that periodizing seems an artificial intellectual trick in face of the fact that life continues even in the midst of destruction. We would add, “So do human wants and the efforts that have to be made for their satisfaction.”

The general sentiment of Congress toward resumption of specie payments had become more and more desultory, not to say negative, during the early part of the 1870's. Nevertheless, the Resumption Act was passed in 1875, and resumption of specie payments at the pre-Civil War parity occurred on schedule in 1879. Observers have slighted this incongruity. Passage of the Resumption Act has come to be regarded as a true reflection of Victorian sentiment; ultimate resumption in 1879 was the proof of the pudding.2 What seems to have been lost in this rationalization of cause and effect is the generally unfavorable light in which resumption was being viewed in the middle 1870's, the alternatives that were available in lieu of resumption, and some of the forces of “immorality” that made these alternatives attractive.

An increase in labor productivity and a reduction of fuel consumption rates were two notable and closely related achievements of the management of Hopewell Forge, an ironworks in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Significantly, these economies were realized in the face of technological stasis through learning by doing. The analysis of this accomplishment is cast in the larger context of the performance of the iron industry before and after 1800.

In spite of the recognized difficulties of dividing the white population of the antebellum South into two distinct classes—slaveowners and poor whites—historians have persisted in differentiating the roles of the small slaveholder and nonslaveholder vis-à-vis that of the large slaveholder or plantation owner. It is the purpose of this dissertation to evaluate the roles of the nonslaveholding and small slaveholding farmer in comparison with that of the large slaveholder in the westward expansion of the antebellum cotton economy.

This article is an essay in both historical synthesis and in the theory of growth. It seeks to explain the process at work in Europe which led up to the surge of British industrial expansion at the end of the eighteenth century as the result of three distinct, partially related, converging forces: public policies induced by the endemic international struggle for power; the expansion of international commerce and of the world trading area; and the complex impact of the scientific revolution. This historical view is then related to the concept of the preconditions for take-off and take-off, as well as to the case of increasing returns.

Previous “new” economic history research on late Victorian Britain often assumes that technology was exogenous to British entrepreneurs. Foreign innovations were available for inspection, and if they were not found suitable, there was no way to adapt new techniques to the British situation. Alternatively, one can assert that technological failure is a key issue in any study of retarded economic performance. A test for the presence of induced innovation—an endogenous theory of technological change—is applied to the British pig iron and cotton textile industries. Results are compared to other technological studies of British and American industry.

The following nore on source material relates to an important aspect of British industrial development in the eighteenth century. Some use of this material has been made by M. W. Flinn of Aberdeen University and myself in our studies of the industry in the Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the field of the sources is so wide and relevant to so much of the economic history of Britain in that period that a summary may be of use to future researches in these rich and neglected sources.

In attempting to fit a phase of the American Revolutionary era into this program on economic unrest, I am not concerned with the factors leading up to the conflict. Historians have traced these in the evolution of the colonies, in changes in Great Britain and, for that matter, in much of Europe, over the long years of peace as well as in the era of controversy. They are complex factors in which thought, whether social, political, or economic, may be far removed from the action that it influences. My concern is with the economic setting in Pennsylvania at the end of the decade of protest and with the rapid changes in price relationships in the early war years which made for unrest within a period of unrest.

Historically speaking, social security systems are a recent development. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was limited state social intervention in the developed world, and even less in Latin America. A remarkable expansion of “social rights” took place in the second half of the century. By the 1970s most Latin American countries had set up at least some form of old-age protection, while others had already developed a wide welfare network. Public social expenditures grew to represent over 20 percent of the gross domestic product in a number of countries, including Argentina.

For anyone on the green side of fifty who didn't start historical browsing in the playpen it may be quite hard to see the present appeal of statistical theory and method in perspective. To one lucky enough to have been a student abroad in the 1920's, it is merely one of the consequences of a fundamental shift, which was firming in that decade, in conceptions of the economic historian's job. Essentially the shift consisted in making the economy and the social institutions in which it is embedded analytically distinct. Voices from the Polanyite school still claim that this step was as wrong as Adam's eating of the apple. Milder critics complain only that some of us let economic analysis run away with the ball to the neglect of social analysis and of the interplay between the two. For workers on the recent past this is defensible, because the heavy fall-out of purely economic data clamors to be dealt with in its own terms. The preindustrialist, who has to dig harder for data, and seldom turns up such pure economic ore, is more inclined to think in terms of interplay.

In Choosing to discuss land policy in that part of the Spanish Southwest which comprises present central and northern New Mexico and most of southern Colorado, I would appear to be using a model area of the West to demonstrate once again that the Homestead Act and principle were unworkable. In actuality the purpose is to note generally what can happen when an American land system runs into an older and highly different Spanish-Mexican one. As Howard W. Odum has observed, “Here two great culture systems have met and clashed and fused and are still in process of clashing and fusing.”

J. D. Gould in a fairly recent article attempts to explain why Thomas Mun did not develop the “self-regulating mechanism of specie distribution.” I find Mr. Gould's argument unconvincing and while I hesitate to question one point in an otherwise interesting atricle, I think the point merits further discussion.