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To Finance the Great War

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One of my favorite business titles in the Library’s collection is the Listing Statements of the New York Stock Exchange.   It yields a lot of really interesting information on stocks and bonds issued by companies.  It sometimes even includes company financial information, which can make it a great source for those doing company research.

Liberty Bond
Listing Statements of the New York Stock Exchange. Volume July 1917 to April 1918.

However, I recently discovered this title isn’t just about company securities – sometimes it includes government securities as well.  For example, I was excited to run across the volume published during WWI when the United States government issued several securities as Liberty Loans or Liberty Bonds to fund the war effort.  These entries were in the July 1917 to April 1918 volume, and the one featured as the image in this post relates to legislation authorized by Congress in 1917.

If you are interested in how the government funded The Great War specifically, the Federal Reserve has digitized some material related to the Liberty Loans, but there are also books like War Loans of the United States and the Third Liberty Loan.  If you want to go even broader and research the relationship between government finances and war, there are titles mentioned in our federal budget guide, as well as books like Birth of a Market: The U.S. Treasury Securities Market from the Great War to the Great Depression.

For more information on the Great War, the Library of Congress has extensive collections, including material that has been digitized and put on our website.  There is a portal specifically for WWI related material which contains teaching resources and themed blog posts.  It features collections like the online exhibit “World War I: American Artists View the Great War” which has posters advertising bonds (this online exhibit is based on a physical exhibit in the Thomas Jefferson Building running May 7, 2016–August 19, 2017).  Also of interest is a guide with links to related material, including non-business sources:

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