Until the early nineteenth century, "risk" was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future.

Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions-insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets-while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk's rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one's own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name "financial services industry." Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system.

Amid the nineteenth-century's waning faith in God's providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. Freaks of Fortune is one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.

About the Author
Jonathan Levy is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago.

Awards
Winner of OAH Frederick Jackson Turner Award 2013 and Ellis W. Hawley Prize 2013 and Avery O. Craven Award 2013 and William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize 2013. Nominated for President's Book Award 2010 and Lawrence W. Levine Award 2013 and Merle Curti Award 2013 and Littleton-Griswold Prize 2013 and Hagley Prize in Business History 2013 and James Willard Hurst Prize 2013 and Vincent P. DeSantis Prize 2013 and Alice Hanson Jones Prize 2014 and SHEAR Book Prizes 2012 and Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Prize 2013 and Ralph Gomory Prize 2013 and S-USIH Annual Book Award 2013 and William H. Riker Book Award 2013 and Allan Sharlin Memorial Award 2013.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674736351
Author Jonathan Levy
Format Paperback
Page Count 432
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press