"In History Departments, It’s Up With Capitalism"
"After decades of history from below, focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy.
Even before the financial crisis, courses in the history of capitalism as the new discipline bills itself began proliferating on campuses, along with dissertations on once deeply unsexy topics like insurance, banking and regulation. The events of 2008 and their long aftermath have given urgency to the scholarly realization that it really is the economy, stupid.
The financial meltdown also created a serious market opportunity. Columbia University Press recently introduced a new Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism book series (This is not your fathers business history, the proposal promised), and other top university presses have been snapping up dissertations on 19th-century insurance and early-20th-century stock speculation, with trade publishers and op-ed editors following close behind.
The dominant question in American politics today, scholars say, is the relationship between democracy and the capitalist economy. And to understand capitalism, said Jonathan Levy, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, youve got to understand capitalists. . . . The new work marries hardheaded economic analysis with the insights of social and cultural history, integrating the bosses-eye view with that of the office drones and consumers who power the system."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0