The History of Banks

First edition of Hildreth's important study of banking, published the same year as the financial disaster of 1837, a highly influential work that "helped to promote the growth of the free banking system in America" (Encyclopaedia Britanica), scarce in original boards. Historian and journalist "Richard Hildreth is one of the more enigmatic figures in American intellectual history" (Schlesinger, New England Quarterly). Following his studies at Harvard, Hildreth "was admitted to the bar in 1830, but he never practiced law. Instead, he turned to politics and journalism: first as a National Republican, then as a Whig" (ANB). A trip to the South prompted Hildreth to write his pioneering antislavery novel The Slave (1836), and in 1837 he published History of Banks,