ELLEN HARTIGAN-O'CONNOR
"America Under the Hammer explores the relationship among auctions, auctioneers, bidders, and bystanders, all of which creates a palpable picture of the nation’s early economic climate.
Well written and full of refreshing details, this economic picture of the early United States is a must for readers."
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—Library Journal (starred review)
"This smart and elegant book explodes market mythologies and confronts the social and cultural forces that made the auction room a site of both possibility and tragedy. Refusing the simple equation of price and value, America Under the Hammer is immediately atop my list of the best books on early American capitalism."
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—Seth Rockman, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
"America Under the Hammer is a fascinating, deeply researched, and impressive book. In it, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor reveals how auctions stood at the center of nation-making, were central to the rise of American capitalism, and helped shape early American ideas about freedom, slavery, gender, and race. This excellent book is essential reading for anyone interested in an economic history of America that positions individuals across race, gender, age, and geographic divides at the center of its analysis."
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- Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property: White Women as SlaveOwners in the American South
"In this thoughtful, engaging book, Ellen Hartigan- O'Connor examines how public auctions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America
became a place where ordinary citizens painstakingly began to build new regimes of value in wave a pryce. Far troe being the product the end, impersonal economic forces, these acts of collective valuation always remained social, even political, acts that resonated long after the auctioneer's hammer came down."
-Stephen Mihm, author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States