ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

ECONOMICS 1740 - WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY

Dr. Richard M. Alston

BRIEF AND ROUGH LECTURE NOTES

Note to students using these lecture notes:

The printable pages listed in the links below consist of extremely rough notes, outlines, comments, vocabulary words, references to sources, etc. They are similar to what one might expect in a student's notebook for the course. Taken by themselves they are probably useless. Used in conjunction with class attendance, however, they should prove an invaluable aid to understanding Dr. Alston's lectures. The student should not expect them to take the place of classroom attendance and should not be surprised if they make no sense when covering material discussed in class when the student was absent. Furthermore, because the notes are prepared in advance and outside of the classroom setting, there is no guarantee that everything covered in the lectures is included in the notes. Nor is there a guarantee that everything covered in the notes will be actually discussed in the lectures. Feel free to ask questions in class concerning any of the material, whether included or omitted in the notes.

Inasmuch as these notes correspond roughly to the notes from which Alston actually lectures, they will be useful. However, Alston has not necessarily updated the notes to match his current thinking (which sometimes changes in response to comments from students, materials read in the past few weeks, etc.) or even his current approach to each topic discussed in class. There is no attempt to make the lecture notes fit exactly into the chronological order in which various topics are presented in your particular course. Dr. Alston knows where the course is going but often takes different paths to get there. There are, to repeat, probably notes included in this set which you can't relate to anything said in class. There is no substitute for thinking, studying, and hard work.

Just as historians create history by looking at the past from a particular contemporary perspective, so too is the meaning of a particular lecture (or entire course) created in the mind of the student as he or she engages in the intellectual give and take relationship with the professor. Your understanding of the course, as well as your own notes, will reflect your own background, interests, beliefs, biases, ideology, experiences, etc.


Lecture One:  What is Economic History?

Lecture Two: Approaches to Knowledge and Truth - Epistemology

Lecture Three: Economic Development as a Process of Social Change

Supplement to Lectures Three and Four:  See Alston's The Individual vs. the Public Interest, Chapter Three "Thee Rise of Individualism" available in PDF file format at http://ereserve.weber.edu . Choose to search either by Instructor or Course name. If you cannot access the Electronic Reserve readings you will need to down load Adobe Acrobat onto your computer. Adobe Acrobat can be down loaded for free by simply returning to the Electronic Reserve main index page and clicking on "GET ADOBE ACROBAT" bar. This "chapter" will provide background to Alston's lectures in Weeks Two and Three.

Lecture Four: The Meaning of Society

Lecture Five: The European Background and the Colonial Period

Lecture Six: The American Revolution, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution

Lecture Seven:  Emerging Economy in the Ante-bellum Era

Lecture Eight: Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Marx, and the Staple Theory of Growth


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