I recently heard a factoid in passing that fascinated me and sparked further investigation: after having been decidedly middle of the pack immediately post-Civil War, the United States’ share of total world manufacturing output became the highest in the world between 1880 and 1900, with a near exponential pace of growth during these decades. Oddly, this was during a time of great financial upheaval, as the Gilded Age Panic of 1873 led to the so-called “Long Depression” of the 1870s-1890s. Because I’m a map librarian and not an economic historian, rather than try to make sense of the monetary and fiscal policy debates over how this could happen, I thought I’d see what I could learn from items in our collection about this interestin
