Research Catalog

Reading the market : genres of financial capitalism in gilded age America

Title

Reading the market : genres of financial capitalism in gilded age America / Peter Knight.

Author

Knight, Peter, 1968-

Publication

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
©2016

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Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	HG181 .K63 2016	Off-site

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Details

Description

xi, 315 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.

Summary

Americans pay famously close attention to "the market," obsessively watching trends, patterns, and swings and looking for clues in every fluctuation. In Reading the Market, Peter Knight explores the Gilded Age origins and development of this peculiar interest. He tracks the historic shift in market operations from local to national while examining how present-day ideas about the nature of markets are tied to past genres of financial representation. Drawing on the late nineteenth-century explosion of art, literature, and media, which sought to dramatize the workings of the stock market for a wide audience, Knight shows how ordinary Americans became both emotionally and financially invested in the market. He analyzes popular investment manuals, brokers' newsletters, newspaper columns, magazine articles, illustrations, and cartoons. He also introduces readers to fiction featuring financial tricksters, which was characterized by themes of personal trust and insider information. The book reveals how the popular culture of the period shaped the very idea of the market as a self-regulating mechanism by making the impersonal abstractions of high finance personal and concrete. From the rise of ticker-tape technology to the development of conspiracy theories, "Reading the Market" argues that commentary on the Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1915 changed how Americans understood finance-and explains what our pervasive interest in Wall Street says about us now.

Series Statement

New studies in American intellectual and cultural history

Uniform Title

New studies in American intellectual and cultural history.

Subject

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-306) and index.

Contents

Market reports -- Reading the ticker tape -- Picturing the market -- Confidence games and inside information -- Conspiracy and the invisible hand of the market.

ISBN

9781421420608
1421420600
9781421420615 (canceled/invalid)
1421420619 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2015047643
99968975262

OCLC

ocn936255876
936255876
SCSB-9403511

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries