Freaks of Fortune : The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America / Jonathan Levy.
Levy, Jonathan, author.
2012
HC105 .L48 2012eb
Available Online

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Title Freaks of Fortune : The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America / Jonathan Levy.
Author Levy, Jonathan, author.
ISBN 9780674067202
DOI https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067202
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2012]
Copyright ©2012
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (360 p.) : 5 tables
Other Standard Identifiers 10.4159/harvard.9780674067202 doi
Call Number HC105 .L48 2012eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 330.12/2097309034
Summary Until the early nineteenth century, "risk" was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future. Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions-insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets-while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk's rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one's own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name "financial services industry." Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system. Amid the nineteenth-century's waning faith in God's providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. Freaks of Fortune is one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)
In E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2012
E-BOOK PACKAGE HISTORY; POLITICAL SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY 2012
E-BOOK PAKET GESCHICHTE, POLITIKWISS., SOZIOLOGIE 2012
HUP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013 (Canada)
Harvard University Press eBook Package Backlist 2000-2013
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Frontmatter
Contents
Prologue: Voyage
Chapter 1. The Assumption of Risk
Chapter 2. The Perils of the Seas
Chapter 3. The Actuarial Science of Freedom
Chapter 4. The Failure of the Freedman's Bank
Chapter 5. Betting the Farm
Chapter 6. Fraternity in the Age of Capital
Chapter 7. Trading the Future
Chapter 8. The Trust Question
Epilogue: Freaks of Fortune
Appendix: Tables
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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