Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, by Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1750. National Gallery, London.

Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, by Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1750. National Gallery, London.

About Money

Volume 1, Number 2 | spring 2008

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Our Robber Barons, by Bernhard Gillam, 1882.

Preamble

Holy Dread

By Lewis H. Lapham

The history of the United States is synonymous with the dream of riches, but the question as to whether money is mortal or immortal has never been resolved.

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Apotheosis of Cosimo de' Medici the Elder, by Anton Domenico Gabbiani, c. 1698.

Arts Endowment

By Tim Parks

Banking, metaphysics, and art in fifteenth-century Florence.

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Map

Perpetual Motion

Tracing the drug trade, the slave trade, and the Silk Road.

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1776 | Kirkcaldy

Toil and Trouble

Adam Smith sets the price. More

1903 | Atlanta

The New South

W.E.B. Du Bois’ critique of American materialism.More

1837 | New York City

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Washington Irving bursts a speculative bubble.More

Charts & Graphs

A-List Weddings

Getting married in modern-day New York and Renaissance Italy.

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Photograph of Michael Lewis

Portrait of Scottish biographer and diarist James Boswell.

Jonathan Swift

American sociologist and reformer W. E. B. Du Bois.

Russian author Anton Chekhov.

American author Tom Wolfe.

Whoever expects to walk peacefully in the world must be money’s guest.

—Norman O. Brown, 1959

Aristotle & Jeremy Bentham

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