Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870 – 2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.
Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia (Basic Books, 2022) tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. [Read more…] about Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century
The Museum of American Finance will host a webinar talk about Jay Gould and the Union Pacific from the Panic of 1873 to 1880 with Joseph Calandro, Jr. on Tuesday, February 2nd, from noon to 1 pm.
On Thursday, July 12, 2018 from 12:30 to 1:30 pm, Historian and author William Hogeland, a contributor to Historians on Hamilton (Rutgers University Press, 2018), will speak on how Alexander Hamilton’s national financial plan worked, why the public remains generally unaware of the details, the extremes Hamilton was willing to go to in order to bring the plan about, and why his opponents (Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin) couldn’t fully dismantle it during 16 years of Democratic Republican administration. The talk will be followed by Q&A. 
On Wednesday, February 22, the Museum of American Finance will open “For the Love of Money: Blacks on US Currency,” a traveling exhibit on loan from the Museum of UnCut Funk.
Last week the Museum of American Finance launched a 12-stop audio tour of its permanent exhibits. The tour was developed in partnership with Antenna – a multi-media story-telling company – and is narrated by a variety of experts including the Museum’s president and curators, as well as CNN founding financial editor Myron Kandel and architectural historian Damien Cregeau. 
