America Under the Hammer

America Under the Hammer
Author :
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages : 254
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781512826524
ISBN-13 : 1512826529
Rating : 4/5 (24 Downloads)

Book Synopsis America Under the Hammer by : Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor

Download or read book America Under the Hammer written by Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-11-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals how, through auctions, early Americans learned capitalism As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism. Starting in the eighteenth century, neighbors collectively turned speculative value into economic “facts” in the form of concrete prices for specific items, thereby establishing ideas about fair exchange in their communities. This consensus soon fractured: during the Revolutionary War, state governments auctioned loyalist property, weaponizing local group participation in pricing and distribution to punish political enemies. By the early nineteenth century, suspicion that auction outcomes were determined by manipulative auctioneers prompted politicians and satirists to police the boundaries of what counted as economic exchange and for whose benefit the economy operated. Women at auctions—as commodities, bidders, or beneficiaries—became a focal point for gendering economic value itself. By the 1830s, as abolitionists attacked the public sale of enslaved men, women, and children, auctions had enshrined a set of economic ideas—that any entity could be coded as property and priced through competition—that have become commonsense understandings all too seldom challenged. In contrast to histories focused on banks, currencies, or plantations, America Under the Hammer highlights an institution that integrated market, community, and household in ways that put gender, race, and social bonds at the center of ideas about economic worth. Women and men, enslaved and free, are active participants in this story rather than bystanders, and their labor, judgments, and bodies define the resulting contours of the American economy.


America Under the Hammer Related Books

America Under the Hammer
Language: en
Pages: 254
Authors: Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2024-11-05 - Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reveals how, through auctions, early Americans learned capitalism As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer follows
The Hammer and the Anvil
Language: en
Pages: 160
Authors: Dwight Jon Zimmerman
Categories: Comics & Graphic Novels
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-07-17 - Publisher: Hill and Wang

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The period leading up to the Civil War was one of great change. Congress divided itself between Northerners and Southerners, citizens on the frontier took up ar
Hammer and Hoe
Language: en
Pages: 412
Authors: Robin D. G. Kelley
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-08-03 - Publisher: UNC Press Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists to
The American Exporter
Language: en
Pages: 364
Authors:
Categories: Commerce
Type: BOOK - Published: 1902 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

History of the United States of America Under the Constitution
Language: en
Pages: 432
Authors: James Schouler
Categories: United States
Type: BOOK - Published: 1913 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK