A documentary history of American economic policy since 1789 / Edited by William Letwin.

Part 1: 1789-1862 - A. Tariffs -- B. Internal improvements -- C. Corporation law -- D. Central banking - Part II: 1862-1912 - E. Regulation of railroads -- F. Antitrust policy -- G. Monetary policy -- H. Conservation -- I. Income taxation - Part III: 1912-1935 - J. Immigration policy -- K. Agricultural price supports -- L. The national recovery administration -- M. Regulation of the financial market.

"A country's economic history is the record of all the economic actions of all its inhabitants. These actions are countless, and the records they leave behind are so numerous, fragmentary, and scattered that the historian can neither hope nor wish to examine more than a minute fraction of them... Although space does not permit me to trace any single policy through its whole career in American history, I have wanted to include a fairly wide (though necessarily incomplete) variety of economic problems. I have therefore chosen to show moments when it was politically urgent. The central control of banking is, for instance, presented in the context of the debate on renewing the charter of the second Bank of the United States. In making this choice, I do not mean to assert that the central banking problem was the single most serious question of economic policy during the 1830s, or that this episode was the most important moment in the history of central bank policy in the United States. My choice implies instead that control of banking is a basic problem of policy, that it was an important political issue during the 1830s, and that the documents offered here deal in an especially illuminating way not only with certain permanent problems of banking but with other issues as well that were peculiar to the time and place." -- From the Preface

From the library of Roscoe & Oletta Proctor.