In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was considerable interest among the scientific and business communities in the relationship between work, fatigue, health and productivity. Study after study not only documented well-known relationships between occupation and disease...

We know remarkably little about the length of the working day before the 1880s. In this paper, we summarize what is known about the trend in the length of the workday in American manufacturing industry from 1830 to 1890. We than develop estimates of the daily hours of work and form the basis for...

After sketching various ways in which economic issues influenced the political realignment of the 1850s, the paper concentrates on five questions: (1) the timing of the economic issues and the disjunctions in economic developments across regions and classes; (2) the size of the nonagricultural...

This paper makes use of hitherto untabulated data from the censuses of manufacturing for 1870 and 1880 to investigate the extent to which firms operated at less than their full capacity year round in these census years and thus provides some evidence of the extent to which workers may have faced...

We present new archival evidence on the price of vacant land in New York City between 1835 and 1900. Before the Civil War, the price of land per square foot fell steeply with distance from New York's City Hall located in the central business district. After the Civil War, the distance gradient...

This paper examines the performance of the Boston stock market, the nation's premier market for industrials, between 1835 and 1869, developing new indexes of price performance, dividend yields and total holding period returns for bank stocks and industrial equities using annual data from Martin...

The California Gold Rush was an unexpected shock of tremendous size that prompted the costly re-allocation of labor to a frontier region. Using newly-collected archival data, this paper presents estimates of nominal and real wages in Gold Rush California. Consistent with a simple dynamic model...

This paper uses newly collected archival evidence to examine various aspects of the geographic performance of American labor markets before the Civil War. Much of the paper addresses the evolution of regional differences in real wages, of interest to economic historians because they speak to the...

Recent research by Joshua Angrist and Alan Krueger has used information on exact dates of birth in the 1960 to 1980 federal censuses to study the impact of compulsory schooling laws on school attendance. This paper modifies their methodology to analyze similar data in the 1900 federal census to...

The 1850s witnessed one of the earliest American history. During the decade the proportion of individuals receiving public assistance -- increased from 5.8 in 1850 to 10.2 in 1860, an increase of 76 percent. Previous attempts to explain the increase in antebellum pauperism have been hampered by...