Introduction to Economics in the Rear-view Mirror

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With this blog, Economics in the Rear-View Mirror (eighth anniversary celebrated on May 8, 2023), I am sharing a growing selection (here is the list of 1713) 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 HarvardColumbiaChicago, 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.

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.

Scroll down if you would like to subscribe to this blog;  new content will be announced by tweet @irwincollier; or visit the outpost on Facebook.

26 replies on “Introduction to Economics in the Rear-view Mirror”

Welcome aboard Jennifer! Glad to have a full-time historian looking into the rear-view mirror over my shoulder.

As an Independent Scholar interested in both archives and economic history, I am glad to find this resources!

So happy to hear! Welcome aboard and enjoy the company of the jolly historians of economics. Your comments, insight and advice are most welcome too.

As a retired economist very interested in economic history, I am happy to find this blog.

Thanks for the feedback. A couple of years from retirement myself, providing content to this blog is the plan from here on out.

Thanks Iwin! For those few of us students under the German Historical School method (Tallinn University of Technology) this is an invaluable repository. I know that my professor Erik Reinert (Cornell, Harvard, St Gallen) would be interested and I’ll let him know about your website.

You are most welcome! As coincidence would have it, I just posted a link to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin’s first edition of Carl Menger’s “Die Irrthümer des Historismus in der deutschen nationalökonomie” from 1884 on my “Rare Book Reading Room” page. Needn’t worry, both sides of the debate will get their place on that page…Cheers.

I am Steven from China, who was insipred by Armen.Alchian’s book and start to love the economics.
This website is unbelievable precious!!!
Thank you Professor.
But since the UCLA is also an important place for the conomics,
I wish to see some stuff from the Alchian, Jack.Hirshleifer…etc.

Thanks a lot.

Steven
15/1/2018

Thanks Steven. UCLA economics is indeed important. I began my research on the training of economists with an artificial end-point of ca. 1950 (i.e. to just before I was born). In the meantime I have gradually relaxed the window to ca. 1970 (before I had much contact with university economics). In any event, I have not had the opportunity yet to explore the archives at UC Berkeley or UCLA. For 1950-1970 I really need to do more, but 1870-1950 is not exactly overstudied so it will take me some time to get there. Hope to get there soon though.

Dear Irwin Collier,

I regularly read your postings, but now I wonder if you can help me in a new piece of research I am starting. I am interested in the History of Econometrics and want to look at the work of Henry Schultz at the University of Chicago. Is there anything that you have posted that would help me in my research?

Thanks,

Jim Thomas (LSE)

What a treasure trove! Unsurprising you would be the source/curator.

I’m wandering about from topic to name to place in my usual intersectional approach. Random juxtapositions generate more questions, hard to stop.

Love from Minnesota,

Lucy

Dear Irwin,

I found your Economics in the Rear-View Mirror web site while doing some research on Elmo Hohman.

Your work as an archaeologist of the history of economic thought is an invaluable resource.

Thank you.

Mark

Irwin, what a wonderful webpage! I just read the post on German universities 1901! A joy to read, and amazingly, some descriptions seem apt, even today! I hope you’re doing well.

Hi Christine, thanks for feedback! The post has proved to have attracted thousands of visitors after my distinguished colleague Tyler Cowen gave it a thumbs up. Stay tuned, about to put up a couple of money and banking exams of your Dad. — Bud

I found your posting on Elizabeth Lane Waterman, which is wrong about her death date. You give the date of August 18, 1958, which was the death date of her ex-husband. Elizabeth died on October 10, 1973. The Boston Globe included several obituaries for her at that time, and she published in 1968 A Primer on the Economics of Consumption.

Many thanks for the correction. I trusted an ancestry.com family tree entry without doing due dilegence. But what is nice about having a website, it is not difficult to correct a post.

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