Category: History

  • A Collector of Rare Books

    Martin LutherAs the story goes…

    A Collector of rare books ran into an acquaintance who told him he had just thrown away an old Bible that he found in a dusty, old box. He happened to mention that Guten – or somebody-or-other had printed it. Not Gutenberg? – gasped the collector. Yes, that was it! “You idiot! You’ve thrown away one of the first books ever printed. A copy recently sold at auction for half a million dollars!”

    “Oh, I don’t think this book would have been worth anything close to that much,” replied the man. “It was scribbled all over in the margins by some guy named Martin Luther.”

  • The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860

    Calvin Schermerhorn
    The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn – Both Hardcover and Kindle available from Amazon.com

    By Calvin Schermerhorn

    Available from Amazon.com

    Calvin Schermerhorn’s provocative study views the development of modern American capitalism through the window of the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade. This eye-opening history follows money and ships as well as enslaved human beings to demonstrate how slavery was a national business supported by far-flung monetary and credit systems reaching across the Atlantic Ocean. The author details the anatomy of slave supply chains and the chains of credit and commodities that intersected with them in virtually every corner of the pre–Civil War United States, and explores how an institution that destroyed lives and families contributed greatly to the growth of the expanding republic’s capitalist economy.