The major purpose of this article is to measure factor-saving biases in technical change within the American and British textile sectors during the nineteenth century. This empirical attempt will be made within the context of the historical debate concerning the causes for the superiority of American industrial efficiency as compared with the British.

The federal policy of granting land in aid of railroad construction in the mid-nineteenth century has been the focus of many heated discussions. Both praised and attacked by contemporaries, it has remained a lively issue in the pages of history books and in journal articles. Several “land-grant legends” have developed, referring to different problems in the evaluation of these measures. At issue have been the question of the justification for land grants, the value of the benefits provided the railroads, and the determination of whether the government aid did provide net benefits to society as a whole. While the “land-grant legend” has been frequently buried, it has invariably been resurrected in one guise or another. In large measure this state of affairs has been due to the failure to specify fully the problems under discussion, and to approach systematically their resolution.

Between 1870 and 1900 American farmers organized in the Grange, the Alliances, and the Peoples (Populist) Party and protested against a variety of economic ills. Economic historians have generally explained the farm organizations and the protests in the same way that the farmers themselves explained them—in terms of low agricultural prices and high costs of inputs resulting in part from the monopolistic organization of the suppliers of those inputs. However, there now exists considerable evidence indicating that the economic conditions of the time were not: as the farmers depicted them, thus raising two questions: (1) if the farmers' statements about their economic state cannot be accepted as historical fact, then why were the farmers so angry? and (2) why did they choose to protest the issues which they did?

Being a brief account of Northern money market conditions from 1861 through 1865, including representative empirical tables, together with yield curves and graphs, and containing speculations on the influence of gold.

The initiating forces and contributing factors in the contraction of economic activity during the Great Depression have received a good deal of attention from students of economic history. The occurrence of concomitant falls in the price level and income level during the 1929–1934 depression period has often been cited as evidence of the real-balance effect's lack of empirical significance. In light of the recent developments in monetary theory regarding the contribution of demand deposit creation to net wealth, some reappraisal of the role of monetary wealth as a stabilizing influence in the depression period seems in order. The purpose of this article is to examine the endogenous determinants of the deposit ratios during a severe economic downturn and their relation to cyclical changes in the price level by which changes in business activity affect the stock of demand deposits, bank reserves, and thus the stock of bonds held by banks.

To be an expert was to assume a position of special significance in public life during and following the Progressive Era in America. To be trained in scientific principles of medicine, sociology, public administration, or economics was to be prepared to develop the opportunities and promises of American life and to reform those institutions and ideas that hindered progress. Some attention has been drawn to the limited use by government of professional academic economists starting in the early years of the twentieth century. But the work of American economists as advisers has generally been neglected, especially in relation to the study of American foreign relations. Focussing upon the work of Edwin W. Kemmerer in the five Andean countries of South America between 1923 and 1931, this article is an attempt to indicate the possibilities for fruitful research into various dimensions of foreign economic advising.

The September, 1971 issue of the Journal contained A. G. Ford's article, “British Investment in Argentina and Long Swings, 1880–1914.” For total U.K. overseas issues, Professor Ford used as his source, Matthew Simon, “The Pattern of New British Portfolio Foreign Investment 1865–1914,” which appeared in J. H. Adler, editor, Capital Movements and Economic Development.