During the first two centuries of European colonization of what is now the United States, executions for a variety of offenses relatively frequently involved mass executions, that is, the execution for the same criminal incident of four or more persons. By the time of American independence, some...

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislative-issued fiat paper monies as their principal internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. It was monetary experimentation on a grand scale. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged...