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• 1 2017-07-06T06:44:52-07:00 An Age of Panics 26 Nineteenth Century Track plain 2017-10-07T06:59:15-07:00

  “In one word, excitement, anxiety, terror, panic, pervades all classes and ranks.”

  Thus did one observer describe the onset of the Panic of 1837, an antebellum financial crisis that brought in its wake business failures, farm foreclosures, and mass unemployment lasting for years. Similar events, wreaking havoc with prices, wages, and the familiar pace of commercial life, struck at least once per generation from the 1830s to the 1930s, spinning the nation through a dizzying cycle of booms and busts. For much of this period, however, when Americans set about explaining these economic swings, they did so with a conceptual toolkit markedly different the one we use today. Data on supply and demand, indicators like GDP or the unemployment rate, and even notions of contraction and growth lay far in the future.
  
  Instead, many Americas of the long nineteenth century turned to technical and artistic images that told a range of stories about how the economy functioned, why it bounced men and women up and down with little warning, and what might be done to steady its fitful activity.
   
• 1 media/AAS - The Explosion-1.jpg 2017-07-19T07:25:25-07:00 An Age of Panics 6 version 2 plain 2017-07-19T07:39:19-07:00

  “In one word, excitement, anxiety, terror, panic, pervades all classes and ranks.”

  Thus did one observer describe the onset of the Panic of 1837, which sent the entire American economy into a tailspin that lasted for years. Such events struck at least once per generation during the long nineteenth century ((maybe a link here to a page within the exhibit that’s just a timeline of major economic events)), spinning the nation through a dizzying cycle of booms and busts. Yet when Americans set about explaining these economic swings, they did so without many of tools we take for granted today – data on supply and demand, indicators like GDP or the unemployment rate, and models of the relationship between interest rates and growth, for example.
  
  Instead, they turned to technical and artistic images that told a range of stories about how the economy functioned, why it bounced men and women up and down with little warning, and what was to be done to steady it.
   

• 1 2017-02-10T10:15:14-08:00 An Age of Panics 5 plain 2017-03-03T10:53:38-08:00 “In one word, excitement, anxiety, terror, panic, pervades all classes and ranks.” Thus did one observer describe conditions in New Orleans, the financial capital of the South, at the onset of the Panic of 1837. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some kind of national economic catastrophe struck at least once a generation. Smaller crises, affecting cities or regions, were common too. Said Congressman William Frye in 1873, "There is a gale blowing always in commercial life, and beneath that gale there are wrecks every day and every hour unnoticed by the world."
   
• 1 2017-07-20T10:58:47-07:00 An Age of Panics 1 plain 2017-07-20T10:58:47-07:00