Tag Archives: inflation

Greenbacks, Negro Soldiers, and the President

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, an excerpt from my book Face Value. During the Civil War, Lincoln’s opponents saw African Americans in uniform and Greenback dollars as the same thing: inflated. We can see the same phenomenon today. The Civil War wasn’t all that popular in the North. Despite a […]

March 6, 2012 – 12:17 pm | By admin | Posted in History, teaching | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)

Rhetoric of the Gold Fetish

In anthropology, a “fetish” is an object believed to have magical powers. A rabbit’s foot, a horseshoe, a lucky coin: these are “fetishes,” material things supposedly animated by magic power. They can ward off bad times. Historically, when Americans talked about the gold standard, they often talked about it as magical. Gold would make bad […]

November 23, 2010 – 3:09 pm | By admin | Posted in Money | Tagged , , , , | Comments (20)