Posts

Monetary and Nonmonetary Explanations for the Great Depression

Image
              The Great Depression was a worldwide event that kicked off with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929. The general causes for the crash are understood to be the accumulation of easy credit based on an overly optimistic financial outlook throughout the 1920s. This trend resulted in risky credit decisions on the part of banks and other lenders, including loaning money for marginal investments. The rising debt across the board created market instability and eventually led to the crash.             The primary economic theories have reached a rough consensus that world governments were too slow to react to the crash and subsequent business failures, leaving lenders holding the bag, often with no way to liquefy what assets they had. It is generally asserted that governments should have quickly lowered interest rates, lowered taxes, and injected cash into the system to ease liquidity problems. Most governments either did not take these actions or waited too long before a
Post a Comment
Read more

Henry Ford and the Advent of American Mass Production

  Henry Ford was perhaps the most influential entrepreneur of the early twentieth century. Raised on a farm near Detroit, Michigan, Ford disliked farm work and went to work as a machinist in his teens. In the 1870s, Ford began experimenting with steam engines and by the mid-1880s was working on early internal combustion engines. 1887 saw the completion of a four-cycle engine of his own design. This was followed by a two-cylinder motor in 1890. Ford, in his autobiography, said he completed his first automobile in 1892. It was powered by a two-cylinder, four horsepower engine and could travel at speeds up to twenty miles per hour. It rode on four bicycle wheels with rubber tires and was dubbed the “quadricycle.” He eventually built three of these vehicles, each an improvement upon its predecessor. Ford had gone to work for Thomas Edison’s Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit in 1891 as an engineer. He became chief engineer in 1893 and his work with powered automobiles drew Edison’s p
Post a Comment
Read more

The Expansion of the American Coal Industry in the Latter Nineteenth Century

Image
              The coal industry, embattled as it is in the twenty-first century, was a vital part of American industrialization and expansion in the century after the Civil War. Prior to the war, coal was essentially a cottage industry run by small, independent operators in support of the emerging railroad companies and only beginning to supplant timber as heating and industrial fuel.                The war itself created a huge demand for coal as the iron and steel industries ramped up in response to the needs of the war industries, especially in the North. Coal not only fired weapons production, but also railroads, whose construction and use exploded in the war years. With the expansion of railroads came the ability to transport coal in large amounts, not only to the factories, but to the urban centers themselves, allowing for cheaper, more efficient fuel for everyone.             The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the great western expansion, made possible by the
Post a Comment
Read more

Captain Milton Hall Harman, CSA

Image
As a military historian, I have long been interested in my family’s role in America’s wars, and there have been many of them. The most fascinating of these, however, are my Civil War ancestors, for the simple reason that I can visit the battlefields where they fought and, in some cases, retrace their steps. I’ve done this on several occasions, at Manassas, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania. I have also located the graves of three of my ancestors, and am currently in the process, with my brother, of marking one of them. Fortunately, that one unmarked grave lies in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, whose excellent records allowed us to pinpoint his exact resting place. The ancestor for whom I have the most available information is Captain Milton Hall Harman of Montgomery County, Virginia. Born in 1838, Milton was 22 years old when he enlisted in the Confederate Army on April 17, 1861. He was assigned to Company G, the “Liberty Hall Volunteers,” of the 4th Virginia Infantry Re
Post a Comment
Read more

John Quincy Adams on the Providential Nature of American Liberty, July 4, 1793.

                  “…Then shall the fair fabric of universal Liberty rise upon the durable foundation of social equality, and the long-expected era of human felicity, which has been announced by prophetic inspiration, and described in the most enraptured language of the Muses, shall commence its splendid progress…”             So stated John Quincy Adams in his stirring address to the citizens of Boston on July 4, 1793. The future President of the United States was referring to the spread of the ideals unleashed by the American Revolution throughout Europe and the world, but his Biblical framing of the notion of “universal Liberty” should not be overlooked. “The long-expected era of human felicity” undoubtedly refers to the idea of the second coming of Christ and the thousand years of His benevolent rule. The reference to “prophetic inspiration” is a clear reference to the Biblical prophecy concerning Christ’s return.             Though rarely overtly, Adams references the Bible thr
Post a Comment
Read more