Bücher von Robert E. Mitchell

Combining narrative history with data-rich social and economic analysis, this study examines the failure of frontier farms in the antebellum Northwest Territory, where legislatively created markets and poor surveying resulted in massive investment losses for both individual farmers and the national economy.

This study suggests how traditional language-rich narrative histories of the Pale of Settlement can benefit from drawing on the large vocabularies, questions, theories and analytical methods of human geography, economics and the social sciences for an understanding of how Jewish communities responded to multiple disruptions during the nineteenth century. Moving from the ecological level of systems of settlements and variations among individual ones down to the immediate built environment, the book explores how both physical and human space influenced responses to everyday lives and emigration to America.

This Palgrave Pivot demonstrates that the inherited vocabularies of economics and other social sciences contain socially constructed words and theories that bias our very understanding of history and markets, bridging the empirical and moral dimensions of economics in general and inequality in particular.