Introduction to Economics in the Rear-view Mirror

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With this blog, Economics in the Rear-View Mirror (ninth anniversary celebrated on May 8, 2024), I am sharing a growing selection (here is the list of 1824) of artifacts mostly related to the undergraduate and graduate teaching of economics in the United States from the 1870s through the 1970s. Thanks to an inaugural research grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), I have spent significant time in the Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, M.I.T. and Yale archives as well as in the Hoover Institution Archive and at the Duke University Economists’ Papers Archive. I have also visited the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Johns Hopkins University Archives, and the Library of Congress.  Other artifacts I have transcribed have been trawled from on-line archives from other universities as well as archive.org and hathitrust.org. I do hope that the material provided here helps the academic community of historians of economics, practicing or in-training.

I retired from Freie Universität Berlin on July 31, 2018. My farewell lecture was given July 4, 2018. During the academic years 2018/19 through 2021/22 I taught at Bard College Berlin. Currently, I am a free-range scholar.

Here an ancient, short video interview that introduces me and my original INET project. A work-in-progress interview podcast about what I am up to in this blog was conducted by Reinhard Schumacher in the history of economics podcast series Ceteris Never Paribus.

For newcomers to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror, here are a few of my Curator’s Favorites.

• A 30 typewritten page list of proposed course paper topics with suggested references at the dawn of the age of Keynesian macroeconomics. From John H. Williamson and Seymour E. Harris’ course on money, banking and commercial crises at Harvard, 1938-39.
• The pastiche of Raphael’s “The School of Athens” for the “Chicago School of Economics 1972” by Roger Vaughan with identifications for the economists drawn.
• Thomas Schelling’s 1970 Harvard course “Conflict, Coalition and Strategy”. Reading list and final exam.
• From MIT in 1976: the complete script for the second-year class’s legendary skit “The Wizard of E52-383c”, featuring a photograph of none other than Paul Krugman playing Paul Samuelson in this Wizard of Oz parody.
• Links to over 98% of the items in the bibliographies in the first edition of Frank W. Taussig’s Principles of Economics (1911).
• Twenty years of graduate economic history exams at Harvard 1930-1949. Courses taught by Edwin F. Gay and Abbott P. Usher.
• Edwin F. Gay’s ca. 90 item short bibliography of English, French, German and U.S. economic history “for serious students”. Links to all but one of the items and multi-volume works completely linked as well.
• Complete links to the works cited by Moritz Kaufmann in the forward to his 1879 book: Utopias; or, Schemes of Social Improvement from Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx.
• Links to 116 books of the 120 published in the distinguished Social Science Series by Swan Sonnenschein (London) 1884-1912.
• Paul Krugman’s M.I.T. course “Principles of Economics” (1998). Reading assignments, lecture slides, problems sets and exams with answers.
• Historical and Practical Political Economy. Outline of Lectures to the Students of the School of Political Science of Columbia College ca. 1891-92. An eight page printed syllabus for a course taught by Richmond Mayo-Smith, now with links to over 95% of the assigned reading.
• Henry Schultz’s reading list (most items linked!) for the mathematical economics course he taught at Chicago in 1935.
• Thomas Nixon Carver’s reading list (all items linked!) for his course at Harvard “Economic Theory in the Nineteenth Century”, 1900-01.
• Linked reading list for the history and theory of money taught by Sidney Sherwood, 1891-92.
• Laughlin’s List from 1887 with links to publications he recommended for every economics teacher’s library.
• Reading assignments for Frank W. Taussig’s economic theory course from 1923-24 (with links!) extracted from Frank W. Fetter’s student notes for the course.
• Fully-linked list of 28 Popular Economic Tracts from 1880-1891 published by the Society for Political Education.
• Reading list (almost completely linked) to William Fellner’s History of Economic Thought course taught at Harvard  during the academic year 1950-51.
• Guide to the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Tripos from 1891. An entire curriculum with major works to be read in psychology, philosophy, and political economy. Includes many links to the Greatest Hits from before turn of the 20th century.
• Undergraduate and graduate labor economics at Harvard, late 1920s. Trade-unionism was the focus of the undergraduate course. Unemployment added to the graduate course. Links to almost everything.
• Back in the day when sociology and economics were still well-behaved siblings, Franklin H. Giddings taught a graduate course in sociology at Bryn Mawr in 1893. This post provides links to nearly all the fifty or so items listed in Giddings’ Sociology Readings.
• The 1902-03 iteration of Thomas Nixon Carver’s Principles of Sociology at Harvard was co-taught with William Z. Ripley. The complete linked reading list and the final exam questions for the course.
• Exam questions for the three political economy courses taught in 1879-80 at Harvard. Links to the relevant sections or pages of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy make this post particularly valuable.

Portraits of economists are not hard to find on the internet. I have added a special collection that features pictures of Economists Wearing Bowties for no other reason than it allows me another excuse to prepare light-hearted fare for visitors to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror. To complement the bowties collection, we also have the Economists Wearing Jewelry Collection. A new feature page was added in October 2022 of colorized photos of economists we have seen in black and white images.

A special service for visitors interested in scans of early editions of important earlier works in economics: a link to “my” Economics Rare Book Reading Room. It is a collection in-progress, so worth returning to from time to time.

Links to books published by Swan Sonnenschein (London) during the quarter century bracketing the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

For links to 20th century economics books, we also have a Twentieth Century Economics Library.

Special pages for Harvard and Radcliffe Ph.D.’s through 1929 and Chicago Ph.D.’s in Economics through 1926.

Links to resources concerning the higher education of women in general as well as in economics.

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