What was the relationship between institutionalized poverty and protoindustrial activity in Bunzlau County of Bohemia at the end of the 1820s? The agriculturally weaker estates developed protoindustries and were therefore the first to institutionalize the care of the poor. Yet protoindustrial development decreased the vulnerability of those at the low end of the income distribution, although industrial activity attracted immigrants from agricultural estates. The immigrants competed for resources with the economically weak, thereby increasing the need for poor relief. On balance, however, protoindustrial activity ameliorated the lot of the destitute peasantry living in this mountainous region of northern Bohemia.

The economic significance of the lottery business is a subject which historians have generally neglected. This is unfortunate, for both in Europe and the United States the lottery was at one time a capitalmobilizing device of major importance. It appears worth while, therefore, to explore in some detail the operations of a lottery firm that seems to exemplify some of the features of the system in its most mature form. This is the firm of Yates and McIntyre, lottery managers in New York State and elsewhere between 1821 and 1834.

American historians have commonly given attention to the manner in which the Federal Government stimulated the early growth of railroads by the remission of tariff duties on railway iron and particularly by land grants after 1850. They have said little about government promotion of railroads before the Civil War through the provision of engineering services. But this engineering aid was a major element in the initial progress of railroading and is an important aspect of the history of government economic policy toward transportation and science. This government aid is here discussed in terms of (1) the technical assistance given to railroads directly by the Army engineers and (2) the indirect stimulus given to railroads by government promotion of engineering science.

Few men have had a worse posthumous press than Langdon Cheves of South Carolina, second president of the Second Bank of the United States. He has generally been portrayed as an able lawyer but ignorant of economics and banking—and often as a narrow deflationist who saved the Bank but ruined the country. Vexed by criticism, he is frequently supposed to have gladly bowed out in favor of the better trained Nicholas Biddle.

Between 1890 and 1950 the labor force of the United States creased by some 37.3 million workers. decade-by-decade States in-increments fluctuated widely, roughly half of the sixty-year increase (18.9 million) occurred over the first thirty years, and half (18.4 million) over the second.