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Financial History Sites: Descriptions and Links

Economic History Services or EH.NET is the premier website for anyone interested in economic history. The site includes an extensive encyclopedia, scads of book reviews, numerous databases, important links, a directory of economic history scholars, and much more. The site also features forms for easy calculation of the purchasing power of the dollar and pound sterling over several centuries. MAIN URL: http://www.eh.net/

History of Capitalism by Colleen Dunlavy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is well worth a visit. Prof. Dunlavy provides links to timelines and other resources, images of rare documents and artifacts, a bibliography, course materials, and an interesting blog. MAIN URL: http://history.wisc.edu/dunlav

The Leslie V. Brock Center for the Study of Colonial Currency at the University is chock full of important documents and resource links. It is part of  The History Ring. MAIN URL: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/users/brock/

History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present contains a chronology and a tremendous amount of information on everything monetary from the origins of money and banking to Celtic coinage. MAIN URL: http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/llyfr.html

Political Economy Bibliography is a great list of great books! MAIN URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~poldrobe/sy448bib.html

KIPnotes (KIP = Knowledge is Power) is another outstanding way to find important books related to business, economic, and financial history. MAIN URL: http://www.kipnotes.com/

Museum of American Financial has a great website and, if you are ever near Wall Street, a super "bricks and mortar" museum. MAIN URL: http://www.financialhistory.org/

Archive for the History of Economic Thought contains free, full-text classics in the history of economics, including the full text of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, most of John Locke's economic and political writings, and much more. MAIN URL: http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/

The Program in Early American Economy and Society has an informative website. MAIN URL: http://www.librarycompany.org/Economics/index.htm

The Social Science Research Network stores and indexes scholarly working papers and articles, many of which can be downloaded for free. MAIN URL: http://ssrn.com/

The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has datasets that may be of interest to financial historians. MAIN URL: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) often publishes items of interest to financial historians. MAIN URL: http://www.fee.org/

The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) has a keen interest in monetary history and, tangentially, financial history. MAIN URL: http://www.aier.org/

Leiden University has a very nice website devoted to business history. The site is usefully organized by region, country, and industry. MAIN URL: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/res/bushis/

Will Goetzman, a professor at Yale, maintains a great site called Will Goetzman's Learning Curves. MAIN URL: http://viking.som.yale.edu/will/finman540/learncurve/learncurve.html

The Alexander Hamilton Historical Society has links and a whole lot more. MAIN URL: http://www.hamiltonsociety.org/

Shelling Out -- The Origins of Money by Nick Szabo is a great introduction to money's roots. MAIN URL: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

 

Historical Research Sites: Descriptions and Links

Library of Congress: Be certain to make the most of this outstanding resource. After all, you paid for it! MAIN URL: http://www.loc.gov/

Historical Census Browser: How many people lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1810? How many slaves were there in Alabama in 1830? Visit this site to answer those and similar questions. MAIN URL: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/

Making of America: This site contains the full text of almost 12,000 early books, some 3.5 million pages all told. And it is searchable. Very valuable, and free. MAIN URL: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/

Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: True to its name. Very readable. MAIN URL: http://www.econlib.org/library/CEE.html

Gunston Hall Plantation Probate Inventory Database: Visit this site to discover what people in colonial and early national Virginia and Maryland owned when they died.  MAIN URL: http://www.gunstonhall.org/probate/inventory.htm

Pennsylvania Heritage Library: Visit this site for full text of Pennsylvania's and America's founding documents. MAIN URL: http://pages.prodigy.net/constitution/pa_heritage_library.html

Statutes at Large, Pennsylvania: This site contains the full text of all laws passed in Pennsylvania from its founding until 1809. MAIN URL: http://www.palrb.us/stlarge/index.asp

American Heritage Library: An eclectic mix of important early documents. MAIN URL: http://www.constitutional.net/library.html

For recent historical financial data, two of the best sites are FRED and FRASER, which come courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve. MAIN URL: http://research.stlouisfed.org/

Warren E. Weber at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has a number of interesting financial history papers and datasets. MAIN URL: http://minneapolisfed.org/research/economists/wew.html

This is a little macabre but also very, very interesting. The Business Plan Archive contains the business plans of failed dotcoms. Remember those? Well, most are "history" already and there are definitely lessons here. http://www.businessplanarchive.org/