Introduction
Most of us sense that our lives are entwined with broader economic forces. When business is bustling and we can afford the things we need and want, we feel that the economy is good. When our hours are cut, we lose our jobs, the stock market tanks, or companies close down, we sense that the economy is bad.
But what is an “economic force”? What is this thing called “the economy”? Have Americans always thought about their economic lives in the same way that we do today? What alternative ideas and concepts have influenced American economic thinking since the market revolution of the early nineteenth century?
Art and Charts: Picturing the American Economy surveys the long history of how Americans imagined their place in the larger economic order. It does this by taking a close look at the visual imagery people created and consumed in order to make sense of the booms and busts, peaks and panics that effected their lives in profound ways. The paintings, cartoons, charts, and graphs that filled the public sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not neutral or objective representations of the forces that led to poverty or prosperity. Each image, from the most elaborate magazine sketch to the plainest line graph, told a story about what had happened in that abstract and bewildering realm of human activity that we now, perhaps still trepidatiously, simply call “the economy.”
