EconAir

Carrie Nation - Prohibitionist INTRODUCTION The recent acrimonious debate over the debt ceiling and possible U.S. government default is way out of proportion to the issue involved.   This is common in American history.   Examples include a small tax on tea and whether the U.S. should have silver coins.   What is often at stake is something much more fundamental. RELIGION IN AMERICA There is an interesting dynamic in the history of Protestantism in America .   As different Protestant churches became the “established” or mainstream churches, Americans have turned away to form and join more evangelical or Pentecostal churches and sects.   The large and sudden popularity of Baptists and Methodists in the first half of the 19 th century was partly a reaction to the less fervent Puritan (Congregational) and Episcopal churches.   As Methodist and some Baptists groups became less evangelical and more “mainstream,” there were numerous ...

  PRECONDITIONS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN AMERICA   In the Beginning Before industrialization began in the 1820s, there was a set of political institutions and cultural values, mostly inherited from England, that encouraged profit-seeking individuals to start new companies.  They included fairly secure property rights, increasing legal limits on monopolies, an independent judiciary that enforced contracts, emphasis on individual rights rather than social obligations, patents, tolerance of markets, and less government regulation of markets than in the past.  Much of this was stated or implied in the Constitution; an activist Supreme Court under John Marshall extended these trends. The Constitution also helped to create a national market and reduce transaction costs by mandating a national currency and limiting states’ ability to make economic policy that favored their own residents.   What America did not inherit from England was important. U...

  Colonial Farm Kitchen. Notice clock in the corner. American Colonial History, 1607-1775   Preliminary Comments   Between 1607 and 1775 about 550,000 – 600,000 Europeans migrated to the American colonies. Most American families were immigrants (or refugees) or had recent immigrant pasts. They were risk-takers. They left long-settled communities and societies to get on small, crowded sailing ships to make the dangerous 3,000 voyage to a new land that was mostly wilderness. Many died. They had to adapt to a new, frontier environment. They had to “tame the howling wilderness.” A high percent of the European immigrants in this period were from England, Scotland, and Scots from Northern Ireland. Almost all were Protestants.   Emigrants from England and Scotland came over in four “waves.” They were four distinctly different groups of people from different areas of the English isles.   To understand why these four groups left England and Scotland, at different times, ...