Industrial Revolution

A British stock bubble centered on the South Sea Company, granted a monopoly on trade with South Ame...

A financial bubble in France engineered by John Law, a Scottish financier. Laws Mississippi Company ...

The first major peacetime financial crisis in United States history. The panic followed the War of 1...

A financial crisis that touched off a major recession lasting until 1842. The panic was triggered by...

The founding document of the New York Stock Exchange. On May 17, 1792, 24 stockbrokers signed an agr...

A speculative bubble in British railway shares in the 1840s. Parliament authorized 8,000 miles of ne...

A period of intense land speculation during the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts from 1750 to 1860. Comm...

A land speculation frenzy in the Mississippi Territory and Alabama in the early 1800s. Settlers and ...

A speculative frenzy in American canal companies in the 1820s. The success of the Erie Canal, comple...

The Free Banking Era from 1837 to 1863 allowed anyone to start a bank and issue currency with minima...

The First Bank of the United States was chartered in 1791 for 20 years. Proposed by Alexander Hamilt...

The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 to stabilize the economy after the War of...

James Marshall discovered gold at Sutters Mill on January 24, 1848, triggering the California Gold R...

Alexander Hamiltons whiskey tax of 1791 was the first tax on a domestic product by the new US govern...

The Stamp Act of 1765 imposed the first direct tax on American colonists. It required printed materi...

The Tea Act of 1773 gave the British East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies, und...

The Georgia Gold Rush of 1829 was the first major gold rush in the United States, twenty years befor...

Charles Dickens witnessed Railway Mania and satirized it in his 1846 novel Dombey and Son. The chara...

The invention of the telegraph in 1844 revolutionized stock trading. Before the telegraph, price inf...