FTE Notes
John Wallis
Wooster and Williamsburg, June and July 2008
This page has links to the notes I use for the lectures I gave at Wooster and Williamsburg, June 2008, as well as the overheads I used.
I have also included the Powerpoint versions of the slides I gave at Williamsburg, I probably won't have a projector at Wooster and so have included those slides as PDFs.
I gave two additional lectures at Wooster.
The Constitution as an Economic Document
Opening Access in Early America
The Causes of the Great Depression
Lecture Overheads (all in one file)
Except for the PDFs of the Powerpoints
Other reading.
As I mentioned in the lectures, there are many sources of information on American Economic History and the topics that I covered this year.
Property Rights in Land:
There is a classic book by Jonathan Hughes on the development of economic institutions in the United States.
Social Control in the Colonial Economy, University of Virginia Press, 1976.
The Constitution as an Economic Document:
The literature about the Constitution is, of course, enormous.
A modern classic is:
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, University of North Carolina Press, 1969.
The economic interpretation of the Constitution goes way back to a book by Charles Beard. A recent look at the Beard controversy is a book by Robert McGuire:
To Form A More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
A paper by McGuire summarizes the book and covers the economic history of the constitution. It is coming out in a book edited by Price Fishback in 2006. A preliminary version of the paper is here:
"The political economy of the Constitution."
I have a paper in the same volume that summarizes the economic history of American Government from the Constitution to 1860:
"American Government, 1790 to 1860."
Opening Access in Early America
This is part of a project I am doing with Doug North and Barry Weingast.
My paper on Constitutions, Corporations, and Corruption lays out the early American History. The paper is quite readable, just skip the section with the mathematics.
The larger project is described in an NBER working paper "A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History."
The Causes of the Great Depression:
This is another enormous topic.
An older book about the Great Depression in general, that I still use, is
Lester V. Chandler, America's Greatest Depression, 1929-1941. Harper and Row, 1970.
Chandler's book has all of the relevant statistics about the economy and the New Deal, and a lot of common sense.
The professional debate on the Causes of the depression has taken lots of twists and turns over the last few decades. In 1976 Peter Temin argued against the idea that monetary forces caused the Great Depression
Peter Temin, Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? Norton, 1976.
In 1991 Temin argued for the idea that monetary forces caused the Great Depression,
Peter Temin, Lessons from the Great Depression, MIT Press, 1991.
Temin is a clear writer and the exposition is straightforward in both books, although probably not for the average high school student.
The current standard argument about the causes of the Depression can be found in
Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939. Oxford, 1996.
The New Deal:
Again, an enormous topic.
The Chandler book is helpful.
I wrote an entry for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American History on the New Deal. Here it is:
There are more references in the article that you can look into.