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An illuminating history of America's original credit market. The Continental Dollar is a revelatory history of how the fledgling United States paid for its first war. Farley Grubb upends the common telling of this story, in which the United States printed cross-colony money, called Continentals, to serve as an early fiat currency—a currency that is not tied to a commodity like gold, but rather to a legal authority. As Grubb details, the Continental was not a fiat currency, but a “zero-coupon bond”—a wholly different species of money. As bond payoffs were pushed into the future, the money's value declined, killing the Continentals'viability years before the Revolutionary War would officially end. Drawing on decades of exhaustive mining of eighteenth-century records, The Continental Dollar is an essential origin story of the early American monetary system, promising to serve as the benchmark for critical work for decades to come.

This book provides the most comprehensive history of German migration to North America for the period 1709 to 1920 than has been done before. Employing state-of-the-art methodological and statistical techniques, the book has two objectives. First he explores how the recruitment and shipping markets for immigrants were set up, determining what the voyage was like in terms of the health outcomes for the passengers, and identifying the characteristics of the immigrants in terms of family, age, and occupational compositions and educational attainments. Secondly he details how immigrant servitude worked, by identifying how important it was to passenger financing, how shippers profited from carrying immigrant servants, how the labor auction treated immigrant servants, and when and why this method of financing passage to America came to an end.

More than forty percent of all German immigrants entering the port of Philadelphia in the early 19th century entered into servitude as a means of paying for their passage. After the servant contract was negotiated and the shipper paid, the contract was registered with the government. This register of servant contracts, one of the few existing documents that can be used to identify German immigrants for the period 1817-1831, contains a summary of the key elements in the actual contracts, including the servant's name, buyer's name, occupation, township, county and state of residence, length of servitude, and the amount paid to the shipper. Altogether nearly 1,200 of these contracts were registered in the years 1817-1819, with only 73 entries recorded between 1820 and 1831. Thus this is an indispensable finding aid for the period just prior to the keeping of official passenger arrival records in 1820.

Perhaps more than half of all immigrants arriving in the mid-Atlantic region in the 18th century were persons engaged to work for a fixed term of years--runaway servants, convicts, or apprentices--and, owing to various tribulations, thousands of these laborers absconded from their contracts, leaving their masters little choice but to advertise in the newspapers for their capture and return. Over the years many thousands of ads for runaways were placed in the centrally situated Pennsylvania Gazette during its years of existence, 1728-1796, and they give many pieces of information on these individuals that are of interest to genealogists. In this work, Prof. Farley Grubb has extracted all relevant details on 6,000 runaways who had been advertised for during this period. Data presented, for example, includes colony or county of residence, national origin, age, occupation, circumstances of employment, date of escape, height and physical features, place and time of arrival in America, and a variety of specialized information.