From market memoirs, newspapers, financial journals, and Congressional records, the author has woven a narrative describing the political, social, and economic adjustment of the American people to the speculative machinery that developed between 1868 and the New Deal. The book begins with the struggle of Populist legislators, representing stable farmers, to win a Congressional ban of future commodity trading. Congress failed to act, but anti-speculation, a characteristic of Populism, remained important. In the Progressive era, the stock market rivaled the commodity exchanges for attention. Criticism of market practices was rampant as stories of Plungers spread, but no halt came until the crash. Then New Deal philosophy favored the Progressive faction of the anti-speculators. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

From market memoirs, newspapers, financial journals, and Congressional records, the author has woven a narrative describing the political, social, and economic adjustment of the American people to the speculative machinery that developed between 1868 and the New Deal. The book begins with the struggle of Populist legislators, representing stable farmers, to win a Congressional ban of future commodity trading. Congress failed to act, but anti-speculation, a characteristic of Populism, remained important. In the Progressive era, the stock market rivaled the commodity exchanges for attention. Criticism of market practices was rampant as stories of Plungers spread, but no halt came until the crash. Then New Deal philosophy favored the Progressive faction of the anti-speculators. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The great flight that brought colonists in the 1600s to what would become New England was a resettlement that had not only a geographical and spiritual impact, but an important historical impact as well. The influences of the settlers' English origins, and the fact that various religious groups inhabited specific areas of New England, strongly shaped American history through the 1800s and beyond. Cedric Cowing demonstrates that there were two Englands, one evangelistic and one rationalistic. In the northwest of the British Isles was a society that was pastoral, westering, otherworldly, and revivalist--in the southeast was another, more established and mercantile. These two strains set the stage and powered the action for the biggest religious event of the eighteenth century--the Great Awakening. The leaders of the New Light in the Great Awakening were the Saving Remnant, mostly ministers with liberal education who retained their evangelical and seeker religiosity. The clearly identifiable regional religious parallels between old England and New are still discernable today and give a new slant to heretofore unresolved historiographical issues. Cowing shows how regionalism influenced the nature of New England Puritanism and how the presence of a strong and persistent link between regional origins and religious behavior led to the inevitability of the Salem witch trials.