An underlying theme of my book Why America Lost the War on Poverty was that the widening gap between job seekers and good jobs was a major cause of poverty. As I finished the book, I thought about the need for a deeper analysis of unemployment and underemployment. I joined the National Jobs for All Coalition and began writing “Everybody’s Guide to Jobs and Unemployment in America: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.”

In Why America Lost, I proposed that the federal government directly create good jobs — some of them government jobs — to cut unemployment and lift wages. But there were no examples in the period since 1950 that such a project could be done well. In the new book I examine job programs of the New Deal to extract useable lessons.

The first requirement of studying the 1930s is a balanced view of the New Deal. Conservatives Tyler Cowan and Amity Shlaes claim that the New Deal did not bring full recovery. True enough; despite eight years of federal programs, employment and output had not fully recovered by 1941. But the New Deal was a vast improvement over Hoover’s fanatical refusal to use the central government to fix things. During his presidency (1929-1933), output and employment fell by 30%. From Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, private investment began to recover and millions of jobs were created in government programs. In 1937 real output was 44% over the 1933 level. That was not enough to employ everyone who needed job, but it was also not an utter failure. Overall, government promoted recovery, but its timidity, fueled by conservatism inside and outside the administration, limited its effectiveness.

Recently, the Bush administration spent eight years proving that government cannot work efficiently and humanely, but history shows that it does not have to be that way. After four years of Hoover-and-Mellon-do-nothingism in the face of soaring unemployment, the New Deal offered cash and jobs to destitute Americans. And quickly, too. Roosevelt created the Civil Works Administration on November 9 and Harry Hopkins paid a million workers on November 23. Over the winter of 1933-1934, four million CWA employees built or improved 500,000 miles of roads, 40,000 schools, and 3500 playgrounds. They restored every park in New York City, compiled accurate lists of historic American buildings, and engaged in a hundred other useful tasks, from teaching to archeological work.

Beginning in 1935, the Works Progress Administration employed 2 to 3 million people a month. Workers constructed or repaired roads and bridges. Some served as nursery and adult school teachers; librarians delivered books to the backwoods by boat and horse. Thousands of artists decorated public buildings. Two hundred thousand WPA workers were mobilized to help victims of a massive flood in the Ohio Valley.

Some of the credit for the success of New Deal job programs rests on the fact that the depression was so dire that people wanted radical programs. Some credit belongs to Roosevelt who, despite a preference for balanced budgets, was willing to borrow to keep people from starving. Credit goes also to Hopkins, a one-time social worker, and the officials who worked with him. They came from business, social work, and engineering; some were Republicans. They all had the ability to get the job done. Roosevelt could have said to Hopkins, “Heck of a job, Harry,” and he would have been right about Hopkins and the whole WPA staff.

But if the New Deal was often successful, its flaws hold lessons too. Here are five of them. First, we need real federal jobs (RFJ) as a large part of our recovery program. We should use government employment for two major tasks: to offset the private sector’s thirty-year policy of shifting more jobs toward lower pay, fewer benefits, and less security; and to begin to make up for the neglect of public facilities and services. The CWA, for all its benefits, was temporary. WPA jobs were meant to be short-term; employees had to accept comparable jobs in the private sector and in 1939, the tenure of a WPA position was limited to 18 months. Also, due to budget realities and in hopes that workers would be attracted by higher-paying private sector jobs, neither the WPA nor the CWA paid very well. Employees earned about half the poverty line. The knowledge that the job was temporary and had lousy pay even undercut the morale-boosting effects of CWA and WPA jobs. Federal job programs today should include a large share of quality jobs. Job holders should have the chance for career advancement and training and receive decent benefits. They must face the possibility of being removed for incompetence, but they should have the right to unionize and, in contrast Roosevelt’s declaration for the WPA, the right to strike. Above all, they should be paid adequately, reaching fairly soon an annual income well above the family poverty line of $21,000 a year. I suggest $35,000 after a probationary period.

Second, parts of the New Deal (notably the Civilian Conservation Corps) included “green” jobs — but today we face the larger challenge of developing alternatives to fossil fuels. Some solutions to global warming may require a permanent corps of environmental workers to renovate buildings and develop solar, wind, and other clean fuels. Obama wants to battle global warming, but he has not planned a big strike force to do the jobs that cannot be done by tax breaks and regulation.

Third, for the sake of equality and prosperity, job programs must be wide in their reach and inviting to women, minorities, and low-income Americans. In thirty-five years we have not been able to push the poverty rate below the 11% level we reached in the 1970s; one way to do it is to let robust demand for workers raise average incomes. That should be paired with a substantial increase in the federal minimum wage. However, we should avoid limiting RFJs to the very poor, those who in the 1960s were called the “hardcore unemployed.” In this case a program limited to the very poor would be vulnerable to attack as a form of welfare. The WPA was fiercely attacked by conservatives, but it had a broad constituency that helped sustain it for a long time.

Fourth, job tasks need to reach beyond physical infrastructure. Not everyone can succeed in the construction field. We need, for example, to lift the care industry with higher pay, more workers, and better conditions. Whether through direct employment by government or increased subsidies, the feds can improve the quality of jobs in the care business, jobs that are bound to continue growing and providing imortant social services.

Fifth, job programs must be part of a strategy to cure the long-term unemployment that our public statistics and our national policy ignore. For years we have created too few good jobs for those who want to work. And if people had had higher incomes, fewer would have needed sub-prime mortgages.

Even if the current depression is reversed, high levels of hidden unemployment and underemployment will continue. Many who want to work are never counted. The National Jobs for All Coalition (njfac.org) estimates that there are twice as many people really unemployed as the highly publicized official figures show. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claimed that unemployment in February was 8.1% (12.5 million people looked for jobs and could not find them). But if we include those who had a part-time job but wanted full-time work and those who wanted a job but had not looked recently, we get an unemployment rate of 16.7% (26.7 million jobless). The WPA typically employed about 2 million people, one fourth of the unemployed (and even less if we include the hidden unemployed). Obama’s first stimulus package may create 2 million jobs over two years; that is less than 1/10 of the total number of truly unemployed.

We face four job challenges: first, population growth that increases the potential labor force; second, higher unemployment from this recession — already 4.4 million jobs lost in 14 months; third, one of the worst job recoveries ever from a recession (2001-2007); and fourth, the chronic unemployment of millions who are willing to work but are not counted in the official monthly unemployment number. It is up to people who want to fix the recession in a humane way and reverse the thirty-year shortage of jobs and rising levels of inequality to pressure Obama and the Democrats to do the right thing. We need a job-rich Stimulus Package II. Otherwise, in the future, we will have to depend once again on a financial or real estate or dot-com bubble to push economic growth — and suffer the accompanying low average incomes and soaring debt.

Frank Stricker
California State University, Dominguez Hills

On Friday, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer aired a wonderful segment featuring McElvaine and his book,  incorporating some footage from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (the 1939 Frank Capra film starring James Stewart, Jean Arthur, and Claude Rains).

McElvaine ultimately calls for a reconsideration of the 20th-century American value of conspicuous consumption:

[I]t does seem to me that, if we’re going to have to suffer through some hard times, that it would be good to at least see some beneficial things that might come out of it.

And I — I really believe that trying to move away from such an emphasis on consumption as a way of life is something that, while it’s going to be bad for the economy in the short run, is something that we really desperately need to do. Perhaps under the impact of a new economic collapse, we might move away from that and find some other solution to our economic problems.

As Jimmy Stewart’s Jefferson Smith says:

Just one plain, simple rule: Love thy neighbor. And in this world today, full of hatred, a man who knows that one rule has a great trust.

You can listen to the podcast or watch the News Hour segment online.

love,

ellen

President Obama signs the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. photo AP/Ron Edmonds

After Barack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination, pundits asked whether the women who supported Senator Hillary Clinton would transfer their allegiances to her rival. Now that the dust has settled, it is clear is that whether women supported Obama’s initial bid for president or not, those interested in progressive social change view his election as a tremendous opportunity to advance their goals.

Almost immediately after he took office, Obama enacted two of his campaign promises to the women’s lobby. First, he reversed Bush’s “global gag rule” preventing foreign NGO’s from receiving U.S. family planning assistance if they provide abortion counseling, information, or referrals. The gag rule was first instituted by Ronald Reagan, repealed by Bill Clinton, then re-instated by President George W. Bush on his first day of office. In overturning the rule, Obama has enabled a broader range of NGOs working to improve women’s health across the globe to receive U.S. funding.

Obama next moved to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for workers to sue their employers for pay discrimination. As with his support for the NGOs, Obama had signaled his support for the Ledbetter Act before the election. He frequently discussed Ms. Ledbetter’s experiences with sexism and wage discrimination during his presidential campaign and she stumped for him on the campaign trail on several occasions.

Yet if the gag rule and the Ledbetter Act represented expected shows of support for women’s issues, Obama’s economic stimulus plan presented uncharted new terrain. Here was a plan not geared specifically towards women, but that would have profound effects on women’s lives. Insistent that women’s interests not be slighted in the negotiating process, women across the nation quickly sprang into action.

What was novel was not only the new sense of possibility that women’s lobbying groups felt after eight years of Republican rule, but the involvement of women academics in direct public policy advocacy work. Primarily from the fields of history and economics, these scholars used the internet and the print media to help pressure Congress and the Obama administration to make gender and racial equity a priority.

The opening salvo came at the end of November from economist Randy Albelda in the Boston Globe, who lamented the “Macho Stimulus Plan.” Expressing concern that the kinds of “shovel ready” construction jobs and “green” jobs that Obama touted would overwhelmingly be held by men, Albelda characterized the lack of funding for jobs traditionally held by women as “a crucial missing link in this package.”

“Like the need to rebuild our physical infrastructure there is as big a need in developing and expanding our social infrastructure,” Albelda argued. A stimulus package that provided jobs in sectors that typically employed large numbers of women such as health care and education would not only help alleviate poverty, it would “boost the employment prospects of women at all levels of the wage scale.” One month later, lawyer and philosopher Linda Hirschman repeated Albelda’s message on the OpEd page of the New York Times. “There are almost no [jobs for] women on this road to recovery,” she warned.

Other scholars quickly joined the debate. NYU women’s historian Linda Gordon co-authored an “Open Letter to Barack Obama,” which urged the new President not to repeat the mistakes of FDR, whose New Deal job creation programs were overwhelmingly directed toward white men. Urging Obama to invest in jobs held primarily by women, the letter called for rebuilding “not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges, the social connections that create cohesive communities.” More than 1,000 American historians signed the Open Letter. A few weeks later, I joined historians Sonya Michel and Eileen Boris in spreading the word here in North Carolina and beyond. After The Greensboro News and Record published our OpEd,”Obama’s Stimulus Plan Must Include Jobs for Women, Too,” the piece was picked up by newspapers and websites across the country.

Meanwhile, notable feminist economists such as Barbara Bergmann, Nancy Folbre, and Susan Feiner circulated a petition calling for the government to guarantee that women and minorities would receive their fair share of the employment opportunities created by the stimulus package. And after working on parallel tracks, the historians and economists came together to form a group to coordinate their efforts:W.E.A.V.E., Women’s Equality Adds Value to the Economy.

It was an exciting time. For several weeks, feminist scholars and public policy advocates had filled cyberspace with blog posts and articles pressing for gender and racial equity in the stimulus package. When news broke that the Obama administration had stripped funding for contraception for low-income women from the package because conservatives were ridiculing the proposal, my Inbox was inundated with messages debating the implications of this new development. The National Organization for Women immediately created a website to help concerned citizens send emails and phone calls to congressmen. I joined many others in sending letters to the editor of our local newspapers, explaining how funding for birth control was an important tool of economic recovery. Obama did not change his mind about including birth control in the stimulus package, but feminists’ voices were taken into consideration: we learned that he would try to pass a similar provision for contraceptive funding in a different piece of legislation.

Now that the stimulus package has been approved, feminist scholars are both disappointed and heartened by the result of their efforts. Many economists believe that the stimulus package needed to be much larger and focus more on jobs than on tax cuts. Republicans cut funding allocated for many of the programs that target women and children such as Head Start, school improvement, and food stamps. Still the National Women’s Law Center describes it as a “strong plan” that “includes a number of measures that are especially important for women and their families,” particularly its provisions for child care, unemployment insurance, child support, health care, direct assistance for low-income households, education and job training, and job opportunities for women.

What the activity surrounding the stimulus package made clear was that women in both advocacy organizations and in academe feel energized and empowered by the election of President Obama. When National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy was asked if the Obama administration was friendlier to women’s groups than previous administrations, she laughed and replied, “Are you kidding? The difference is like night and day.”

We do not know how far Obama will go in the next four years in establishing legislation that protects women’s rights. Yet what is very clear from these first 100 days is that women across the country plan not only to watch from a distance but to roll up their sleeves and actively participate in the process.

Lisa Levenstein
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

ABC reports that President Obama is reading ten letters a day from all kinds of people all across the country, “to help him get outside of the bubble,” says press secretary Robert Gibbs. Each day he is handed a purple envelope containing the day’s selection of letters. Sometimes he’ll make copies of a letter to distribute to staff; sometimes he responds with a hand-written note of his own.

Obama reads letters from Americans struggling to keep their homes or looking for work in hard times. Sound familiar? Franklin Roosevelt got letters like these, in economic times we fear we are repeating today. Robert McElvaine has sifted through thousands of letters sent to the Roosevelts during the Depression. He edited a collection of 200 of those letters in a volume that has stayed in print for a generation and for which we published a 25th-anniversary edition last year: Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man.

It seems a little ironic that the New York Times included Down and Out in a round-up of books for vacation reading when the book was first published. But in these days of “staycations” and “forced vacations” it may just be good to be reminded that if you’re struggling, you’re not alone.

Regarding Obama’s daily letter-reading habit, McElvaine says, “That’s exactly what Roosevelt did with the letters. This unfiltered contact with public sentiment can be very valuable to the new president, especially in times that are disturbingly similar to those in the 1930s.”

Letters from children are included in Obama’s regular reading. Sometimes kids can articulate startling truths adults have a hard time saying out loud. Sometimes they understand all too clearly when we’re struggling but don’t want them to know it.

Robert Cohen collected 190 of the letters Eleanor Roosevelt received from children in Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression. One kid asks if Mrs. Roosevelt has an old coat to spare for the letter writer’s mother. We are not yet seeing the levels of outright poverty that plagued the 1930s, but the suffering is real. The fear, especially, is real. Lots of people are losing their jobs. Lots of people are losing their homes.

We certainly don’t want to repeat all of the pains of the Great Depression. But perhaps we can learn something from the letters of those who suffered through it. Maybe we can learn how to cope by helping one another. We can learn to remember we’re not alone.

–ellen

ed. update 2/24: Robert McElvaine, who blogs over at The Huffington Post, has his own post about this. Go check out “Like FDR, Obama Learns from People’s Letters.”

ed. update 2/25: Jake Tapper follows up again and posts excerpts of McElvaine’s HuffPost article. Expect to hear McElvaine on NPR’s All Things Considered today or tomorrow, as well!!

frodolives, a blogger over at DailyKos has an imaginative idea for part of the Stimulus Package: Invest in Books.

From his entry:

“a fund of two billion dollars a year to be distributed directly to all public libraries in the United States, for at least five years. (With, perhaps, another billion specifically for university libraries.) I suggest two billion because libraries need money for construction, jobs, equipment, etc. as much as they need money for books. So we give them two billion, and mandate that half of that be spent on books. On top of that we mandate that at least half of the money to be spent on books be spent directly in bookstores and not with either publishers or wholesalers. That’s what makes it a job maker.”

frodolives continues:

“Some points: first, it has to be over several years. Books are a seventeen billion dollar a year industry, so just one billion will have a significant impact on the industry. If, however, we just buy a billion dollars worth of books all at once, it will only serve to enrich the large corporations who own most major publishing houses. They’ll sell off their inventories, print the additional volumes they need, and consider it a windfall. But, if publishers know that this money will be spent every year, then they will need to keep buying new titles, which requires editors, marketing and distribution, new production, and so on.

That is also why there has to be the buy from bookstores clause. Bookstores themselves simply need the business, and will thereby be able to at least keep current employees employed. Beyond that there is a whole world of traveling sales reps who present the books to individual book stores, and, not so incidentally, spend a lot of time and money on the road, at hotels, restaurants, and so on.

It’s a classic case of real world trickle down. The librarians will keep their jobs, they’ll employ people directly and indirectly through construction, puchases of manufactured goods, and purchases of books, which in turn will promote job creation by publishers and booksellers.”

I’ll acknowledge that it’s a far from perfect idea, but I really like the concept. This support for the supply chain from Author to Publisher to Bookseller to Library reaches into the workforce in ways that the current economic Stimulus Package
does not. It also promotes Libraries as community learning centers through the infusion of books (and, presumably, other media) and the operating costs to properly advertise themselves to their communities.

And, as a member of a publishing house, I like the added job security it might provide to myself and my colleagues. That this idea came from someone not in publishing but affiliated with a book store, is also positive, in my mind. It’s an example of someone trying to work out a solution that will help all sorts of people within the community for both the short and long term.

– tom

Oriard begins:

What’s the biggest story in college football so far this season? The dramatic surge of Alabama in Nick Saban’s second year? Early losses by Ohio State, USC, and Georgia, opening up room at the top for the Crimson Tide and others? I’d nominate the SEC’s $2.25 billion deal with ESPN for rights to televise the conference’s games through 2025. With an additional $55 million annually from CBS, the SEC will get $205 million a year over the life of the television contracts, a little more than $17 million per school per year. Those figures don’t resonate with football fans as much as, say, the latest jockeying in the Heisman Trophy race, but it’s these figures that will shape the game’s future.

We’ve been hearing for years that big-time college football is becoming indistinguishable from the NFL. I disagree: College football is much more cutthroat and competitive. On account of pro football’s revenue sharing—most importantly, nearly $4 billion in television money gets split up between the 32 NFL clubs each year—it’s hard for even a lousy pro football team to lose money. NFL clubs do not constantly have to upgrade their facilities in order to attract players. Instead of recruiting wars, pro teams take turns selecting the best college players, whom they pay a fixed percentage of the league’s revenues. NFL clubs also don’t steal one another’s coaches, and what they pay the men on the sidelines is not governed by fear of losing a successful coach to another team.

College football programs share revenue, too, but not nearly as much and only within conferences. That’s why the SEC’s extraordinary windfall could change the basic structure of big-time football.

Click here to read the rest of the article on Slate.

Yes, this is a publisher’s blog. We edit, produce, and sell books. But seriously? Televisions are expensive. iPods are expensive. Nintendo Wii is expensive. Scooters are expensive. Bikes are expensive. Computers are expensive.

Books? Really not expensive. But they can stimulate your ideas, inspire new conversations, show you places to visit (both real and imagined), teach you a skill, make you laugh. That’s why books make great gifts. Whether it’s a gift for yourself or for someone you care about, buying a book is a small investment with a large return.

Consider this:

A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as very happy spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal “Social Indicators Research.”

Woohoo! Be happy! Read books! Cheap! Happy! Books! Yea!

Now that we’ve established that, on to Part B: Your Local Economy. (Don’t worry, there will be no pie charts, line graphs, or mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations. . . .)

As IndieBound reports, when you spend $100 at a locally owned business, 68 of those dollars stay in your community. Spend the same $100 at a national chain, and your community only sees $43. If we all spent $100 at local, indie stores, we could pump more than $2.9 billion into local economies during this recession-plagued season, they inform us. IndieBound.org is helping connect a community of independently owned businesses of all types (not just bookstores) so check them out for places where you can give your local economy the biggest bang with your buck.

Here in the Triangle, the Independent Weekly is encouraging readers to spend their dollars locally. If you can commit $100 to spend locally, go sign up and take the pledge! It could make a $5.9 million impact on our local economy.

Heard from Shelf Awareness: Several book bloggers have started a movement to buy only books as gifts for the holiday season. Postings on buybooksfortheholidays.com include book recommendations, excellent cheerleading about the value of books, a pledge to buy only books as gifts, a signup section and more.

MediaBistro reports that author Carleen Brice has her own campaign going: December is National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give It to Somebody Not Black Month. At welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com, Brice offers an official welcome to the African American section of the bookstore!

If you want some ideas for some good southern reads (and eats!), check out our Southern Gateways page. For lots of brand new books hot off the press, check the left sidebar of this blog for books we’ve published in the past few months.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Enjoy the long weekend, and put books on your list for your holiday shopping. And keep it local!!

cheers,

ellen

Island Press focuses on environmental issues. Their Eco-Compass blog features posts by authors discussing green development, conservation, wildlife, sustainability, population growth, and more.

NYU Press, whose blog From the Square has come back new and redesigned after a hiatus, features posts by authors, links to interviews and podcasts, and even a book trailer.

Princeton University Press has a new blog in full swing with articles from authors, interviews, publicity news, and a special post from the Press’s economics editor, who helped bring to print a host of books that provide good insight into the current financial crisis.

I look forward to reading news from these folks in the future.

Oh! And Happy Halloween! If you plan on spending the night in a North Carolina graveyard, take a flashlight and a copy of Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers, by Ruth Little (with photos by Tim Buchman). Learn a little something while you watch for ghosts!

For more spooky stories, check out our previous post on ghosts of the Carolina coast!

[cue Vincent Price]

Bwwwaahahahahahahahaha . . .

–ellen

The Association of American University Presses occasionally compiles lists of books published by member presses that offer insight into a particular moment in history as it’s happening. “Books for Understanding” lists have grown around topics such as global climate change, immigration, September 11, Iraq, and dozens of other news-making issues. The latest Books for Understanding list addresses the financial crisis.

Announcing this new list, the AAUP said:

As the extent of the financial crisis has grown clear, there have been several announcements of book proposals and forthcoming books that will look at current market events. For incisive, in-depth understanding of what has brought us to this point, however, there is no need to wait. The member publishers of the Association of American University Presses have in print scholarly works for both general and specialist audiences that illuminate the roots of the current situation, and offer potent analysis of regulatory and market solutions.

In “Books for Understanding: The Financial Crisis,” readers, journalists, librarians, policy makers, and teachers will find information and knowledge they can use today to help understand global financial events.

The New York Times has already posted a link to the AAUP list. One could spend all the money stuffed under one’s mattress to buy up all the books on the list, but they’ve broken the list into categories (Wall Street & Financial Markets, Financial Panics & Market Crises, Market Regulation, and Business Ethics) so you can sort through and find what interests you most.

UNC Press has a couple of books on the list. One is Panic!: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction, by David A. Zimmerman, which I blogged about in July. The other UNCP book on the list is a history of the institution now known as Bank of America, which is currently in the position of acquiring other struggling institutions (Countrywide, Merrill Lynch). The Story of NationsBank: Changing the Face of American Banking, by Howard E. Covington Jr. and Marion A. Ellis, tells the history of the Charlotte-based bank whose leaders prioritized competition.

–ellen

Once driven by tobacco, textiles, and furniture, the North Carolina economy now thrives on technology, pharmaceuticals, finance, food processing, and the manufacture of vehicle parts. Walden identifies education as the key factor; a skilled, college-educated work force, he argues, is now a region’s most prized commodity. Walden traces how the forces of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have remade the North Carolina economy, impacted people and regions, and led to the most substantive public policy debates in decades.

Frank Stasio recently interviewed Walden on the State of Things.

Walden also does a daily podcast of his own, every Monday through Friday, covering economic topics of interest to North Carolinians. Recent topics have included the economics of offshore oil drilling, bank failures, and the impact of world trade on North Carolina jobs.

Walden also writes biweekly columns that are distributed through NC State’s Department of Communication Services. You can read his archived columns online.

–Ellen

During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, fiction writers published scores of novels that explored the new cultural visibility of Wall Street, high finance, and market crises. Blending literary, historical, and cultural analysis, Zimmerman investigates how writers turned to fledgling research in mob psychology, psychic investigations, and conspiracy discourse to understand how mass acts of financial reading and popular participation in the corporate transformation of the American economy could trigger financial disaster and cultural chaos.

A Nota Bene selection of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Panic! has received much positive review attention:

• MFS: Modern Fiction Studies [Muse subscription required for viewing] says: “Zimmerman’s book goes a long way toward providing an imaginative and rich analysis of financial panic’s literary coordinates.”
• Novel: A Forum on Fiction says: “Zimmerman’s book should be on the reading list not only of Americanists but also of other scholars interested in the intersections of fictional narrative and financial modernity.”
• EH.Net Review says: “Panic! is a well-written, well-researched study and a worthy addition to the literature of economic and literary history.”
• Business History Review [pdf] calls the book “a winner.”
• The American Historical Review [access to Chicago Journals required] notes: “The book is rich in the anecdotes and details that capture the cultural context of the decades that straddled the turn of the twentieth century.”