Textbook:

• Jonathan Hughes and Louis P. Cain, American Economic History, Addison Wesley.

Course Content: The course combines several approaches to U.S. and Canadian economic history. The neoclassical microeconomic approach called "New Economic History" is accepted in part but there is the ongoing problem of depressions due to a mis-matching the fluctuations in the stream of investment demand with the full employment stream of savings. Depressions and recession are best understood through macroeconomics, the concepts created by the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Where appropriate there will be some reference to the ideas of Marx, Schumpeter and the institutional economists, both traditional and modern. The general outline of the course is as follows:

• The Nature of Economic History
• The Prehistoric Settlement of the Americas
• The Spanish Explorations of What is Now the United States
• The Colonial Economies
• Economic Growth, Capital Accumulation and the Structure of the Economy
• Economic History and the Economic Development of the U.S. 1790-1860
• The Political Economy of Slavery
• The Economies of the Confederate States and the Union
• Republican Neo-Mercantilism and Reconstruction
• The Great Transformation of the American Economy 1865-1900
• The Rise of Giant Enterprises and Monopoly Power 1875-1900
• Oligopoly, Investment, Growth and Instability 1900-1929
• The Great Depression 1930-1940
• The War Economy 1941-1945
• The Great Postwar Boom 1946-1972
• Stagflation and Monetarism 1973-1988
• Foreign Trade, Foreign Investment and the U.S. Economy 1980-1990
• The Economy of the 1990's