The Panic of 1857 was a confidence crisis that spread rapidly throughout the United States and Europe via the telegraph and eventually reached Europe. The news itself was a source of instability within financial markets, creating uncertainty in economic prospects of American land and railroad securities for investors in the United States and Europe.

The story of corporate capitalism is often articulated as “the benevolent spread of progress,” as historian Nan Enstad observes in…

Just weeks after the American battleship U.S.S. Maine exploded in the Havana harbor, president William McKinley declared war with Spain, which…

After the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman was perhaps the most influential advocate of free-market capitalism in the Cold War era. This article examines how Friedman bolstered the image of capitalism by focusing only the its positive dynamics while also marginalizing its destructive dynamics.