The Price of Misfortune : Rights and Wrongs in Indebted America.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Platt, Daniel.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Consumers--Civil rights--United States--History--19th century.

Consumers.

Debt--Moral and ethical aspects--United States.

Debt.

Debtor and creditor--United States--History--19th century.

Debtor and creditor.

Debtor and creditor--United States--History--20th century.

Finance, Personal--Social aspects--United States.

Finance, Personal.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (221 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Summary:

"A history of the struggle for debtors’ rights from the Civil War to the Great Depression What can be taken from someone who has borrowed money and cannot repay? What do the victims of misfortune owe to their lenders, and what can they keep for themselves? The answers to those questions, immensely important for debtors, creditors, and society at large, have changed over time. The Price of Misfortune examines the cause of debtors’ rights in the modern United States and the struggles of reformers who fought to establish financial freedoms in law. Daniel Platt shows how, in the wake of the Civil War, a range of advocates drew potent analogies between slavery, imprisonment for debt, and the experiences of wage garnishment and property foreclosure. He traces the ways those analogies were used to campaign for bold new protections for debtors, keeping them secure in their labor, property, and personhood. Yet, as Platt demonstrates, those reforms tended to assume as their ideal borrower someone who was white, propertied, and male. In subsequent decades, the emancipatory promise of debtors’ rights would be tested as women, wage earners, and African Americans seized on their language to challenge other structural inequalities: the dependency of marriage, the exploitation of industrial capitalism, and the oppression of Jim Crow. By reconstructing these forgotten developments—and recovering the experiences of indebted farmwives, sharecroppers, and wage workers—The Price of Misfortune narrates a new history of inequality, coercion, and law amid the early financialization of American capitalism." -- Publisher's description.

Contents:

Jubilee

The Debtor's Wife

Accounting for Freedom

The Wages of Credit

A New Deal for Debt.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Other Format:

Print version: Platt, Daniel The Price of Misfortune

ISBN:

022673403X

9780226734033

9780226733982

022673398X

OCLC:

1399169570