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Birth and Fortune
The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare
Richard A. Easterlin
University of Chicago Press, 1987
In this influential work, Richard A. Easterlin shows how the size of a generation—the number of persons born in a particular year—directly and indirectly affects the personal welfare of its members, the make-up and breakdown of the family, and the general well being of the economy.

"[Easterlin] has made clear, I think unambiguously, that the baby-boom generation is economically underprivileged merely because of its size. And in showing this, he demonstrates that population size can be as restrictive as a factor as sex, race, or class on equality of opportunity in the U.S."—Jeffrey Madrick, Business Week
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Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides
Lowell Edmunds
Harvard University Press, 1975

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Technology, Growth, and Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution
Patrice Higonnet
Harvard University Press
A galaxy of distinguished international economists and historians pit economic history against the shaky assumptions of the classical economic theory of natural growth. Their explanations consider the factors of technology, entrepreneurialism, and paths to economic growth, but each reflects an ideological wave of explanation that has marked the last two hundred years.
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For Faith and Fortune
The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805-1925
JoEllen McNergney Vinyard
University of Illinois Press, 1998
Even before the massive European immigrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Detroit had a tradition of Catholicism. Multiple immigrant groups became part of the city and considered it important to educate their daughters as well as their sons within the Church.
    
 JoEllen McNergney Vinyard's comprehensive examination of parochial education in Detroit within the broader context of that city's urbanization patterns yields a richly detailed addition to our understanding of the European immigrant experience.
     
For Faith and Fortune will be of interest to historians and scholars of urban studies, particularly immigration, schooling, and the Catholic experience.
 
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Fortune and Faith in Old Chicago
A Dual Biography of Mayor Augustus Garrett and Seminary Founder Eliza Clark Garrett
Charles H. Cosgrove
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020

This engaging biography of Augustus Garrett and Eliza Clark Garrett tells two equally compelling stories: an ambitious man’s struggle to succeed and the remarkable spiritual journey of a woman attempting to overcome tragedy. By contextualizing the couple’s lives within the rich social, political, business, and religious milieu of Chicago’s early urbanization, author Charles H. Cosgrove fills a gap in the history of the city in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Garretts moved from the Hudson River Valley to a nascent Chicago, where Augustus made his fortune in the land boom as an auctioneer and speculator. A mayor during the city’s formative period, Augustus was at the center of the first mayoral election scandal in Chicago. To save his honor, he resigned dramatically and found vindication in his reelection the following year. His story reveals much about the inner workings of Chicago politics and business in the antebellum era.

The couple had lost three young children to disease, and Eliza arrived in Chicago with deep emotional scars. Her journey exemplifies the struggles of sincere, pious women to come to terms with tragedy in an age when most people attributed unhappy events to divine punishment. Following Augustus’s premature death, Eliza developed plans to devote her estate to founding a women’s college and a school for ministerial training, and in 1853 she endowed a Methodist theological school, the Garrett Biblical Institute (now the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary), thereby becoming the first woman in North America to found an institution of higher learning.

In addition to illuminating our understanding of Chicago from the 1830s to the 1850s, Fortune and Faith in Old Chicago explores American religious history, particularly Presbyterianism and Methodism, and its attention to gender shows how men and women experienced the same era in vastly different ways. The result is a rare, fascinating glimpse into old Chicago through the eyes of two of its important early residents.

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Fortune and Misfortune at Saint Gall
Ekkehard IV
Harvard University Press, 2021

The eleventh-century monk Ekkehard IV’s Fortune and Misfortune at Saint Gall, part of the chronicles of the famous Swiss abbey, is a treasure trove of medieval monastic life. Saint Gall’s records span its humble beginnings in the early seventh century to the late Middle Ages, with Ekkehard’s contribution covering the 880s to 972, near the end of the monastery’s two-century-long golden age. Its unforgettable tales, sometimes at odds with the historical record, contain sharp flashes of Ekkehard’s signature humor—when, for instance, a spying abbot from a neighboring monastery is caught hiding in the latrine. Ekkehard also shows how the abbey’s role as a spiritual haven could be compromised by worldly ties, including close associations with the powerful Carolingian and Ottonian courts. He bears witness to the struggles of the tenth-century church reform movement, when Emperor Otto I dispatched investigators to uncover Saint Gall’s deviations from the Rule of Saint Benedict.

This volume publishes the Latin text alongside its first complete English translation.

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Freaks of Fortune
The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America
Jonathan Levy
Harvard University Press, 2012

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.

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Germantown during the Civil War Era
A Reversal of Fortune
George C. Browder
University of Tennessee Press, 2024
Germantown during the Civil War Era recounts the rise and fall of a nineteenth-century Tennessee town, a community that was not a typical antebellum town in the cotton belt. It’s a case study in how social, economic, and political changes affected them, Black and White.

Before the Civil War, Germantown had become a thriving cultural, commercial, and political center. Its elite and middle-class White families had full access to the cultural and social life of Memphis, as well as local private academies and collegiate institutions that hosted enriching events. Its appealing inns, taverns, and mineral springs allowed for festive social mixing of all classes. As an emerging industrial and commercial center of a rich cotton-growing district in the 1850s, Germantown’s decline after the war would have been unimaginable before the war. Thus, this monograph paints a picture of a vibrant community whose brilliancy was extinguished and almost entirely forgotten.

Yet, Germantown’s economic and political decline, caused by a number of factors, is not the most interesting part of its story. Meticulously documented and richly illustrated with maps and data, this book reveals the impacts of surviving a theater of guerrilla war, of emancipation, of social and political Reconstruction, and a disastrous Yellow Fever epidemic on all of Germantown’s people—psychologically, socially, and culturally. The damage struck far deeper than economic destruction and loss of life. A peaceful and harmonious society crumbled. Germantown during the Civil War Era is sure to be of interest not just to Shelby County residents, or students of the Civil War, but also to anyone interested in the racial and social history of the Volunteer state.
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Justice, Luck, and Knowledge
S. L. Hurley
Harvard University Press, 2003

The recent past has seen striking advances in our understanding of both moral responsibility and distributive justice. S. L. Hurley's ambitious work brings these two areas of lively debate into overdue contact with each other.

Key contemporary discussions of distributive justice have formulated egalitarian approaches in terms of responsibility; in this view, the aim of egalitarianism is to respect differences between positions for which people are responsible while neutralizing differences that are a matter of luck. But this approach, Hurley contends, has ignored the way our understanding of responsibility constrains the roles it can actually play within distributive justice. Her book brings the new articulation of responsibility to bear in explaining these constraints. While responsibility might help specify what to distribute, it cannot tell us how to distribute; thus, Hurley argues, responsibility cannot tell us to distribute in an egalitarian pattern in particular. It can, however, play other important roles in a theory of justice, in relation to incentive-seeking behavior and well-being. Hurley's book proposes a new, bias-neutralizing approach to distributive justice that places responsibility in these less problematic roles.

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Modern Luck
Narratives of Fortune in the Long Twentieth Century
Robert S. C. Gordon
University College London, 2023
An exploration of luck in modernity, modern imagination, and modern stories.
 
Beliefs, superstitions, and tales about luck are present across all human cultures. Humans are perennially fascinated by luck and by its association with happiness and danger, uncertainty and aspiration. Yet it remains an elusive, ungraspable idea, one that slips and slides over time: all cultures reimagine what luck is and how to tame it at different stages in their history, and our own era is no exception to the rule.
 
Modern Luck sets out to explore the enigma of luck’s presence in modernity, examining the hybrid forms it has taken on in the modern imagination, and in particular in the field of modern stories. Analyzing a rich and unusually eclectic range of narratives taken from literature, film, music, television, and theatre, from Dostoevsky to Philip K. Dick, Pinocchio to Cimino, Curtiz to Kieslowski, it lays out first the usages and meanings of the language of luck, and then the key figures, patterns, and motifs that govern the stories told about it, from the late nineteenth century to the present day.
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Moralia, IV
Roman Questions. Greek Questions. Greek and Roman Parallel Stories. On the Fortune of the Romans. On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander. Were the Athenians More Famous in War or in Wisdom?
Plutarch
Harvard University Press

Eclectic essays on ethics, education, and much else besides.

Plutarch (Plutarchus), ca. AD 45–120, was born at Chaeronea in Boeotia in central Greece, studied philosophy at Athens, and, after coming to Rome as a teacher in philosophy, was given consular rank by the emperor Trajan and a procuratorship in Greece by Hadrian. He was married and the father of one daughter and four sons. He appears as a man of kindly character and independent thought, studious and learned.

Plutarch wrote on many subjects. Most popular have always been the forty-six Parallel Lives, biographies planned to be ethical examples in pairs (in each pair, one Greek figure and one similar Roman), though the last four lives are single. All are invaluable sources of our knowledge of the lives and characters of Greek and Roman statesmen, soldiers and orators. Plutarch’s many other varied extant works, about sixty in number, are known as Moralia or Moral Essays. They are of high literary value, besides being of great use to people interested in philosophy, ethics, and religion.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of the Moralia is in fifteen volumes, volume XIII having two parts. Volume XVI is a comprehensive Index.

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The Unnatural Lottery
Character and Moral Luck
Claudia Card
Temple University Press, 1996

The opportunities to become a good person are not the same for everyone. Modern European ethical theory, especially Kantian ethics, assumes the same virtues are accessible to all who are capable of rational choice. Character development, however, is affected by circumstances, such as those of wealth and socially constructed categories of gender, race, and sexual orientation, which introduce factors beyond the control of individuals. Implications of these influences for morality have, since the work of Williams and Nagel in the seventies, raised questions in philosophy about the concept of moral luck. In The Unnatural Lottery, Claudia Card examines how luck enters into moral character and considers how some of those who are oppressed can develop responsibility.

Luck is often best appreciated by those who have known relatively bad luck and have been unable to escape steady comparison of their lot with those of others. The author takes as her paradigms the luck of middle and lower classes of women who face violence and exploitation, of lesbians who face continuing pressure to hide or self-destruct, of culturally Christian whites who have ethnic privilege, and of adult survivors of child abuse. How have such people been affected by luck in who they are and can become, the good lives available to them, the evils they may be liable to embody? Other philosophers have explored the luck of those who begin from privileged positions and then suffer reversals of fortune. Claudia Card focuses on the more common cases of those who begin from socially disadvantaged positions, and she considers some who find their good luck troubling when its source is the unnatural lottery of social injustice.

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Virtue, Fortune, and Faith
A Genealogy of Finance
Marieke de Goede
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Less than two centuries ago finance - today viewed as the center of economic necessity and epitome of scientific respectability - stood condemned as disreputable fraud. How this change in status came about, and what it reveals about the nature of finance, is the story told in Virtue, Fortune, and Faith. A unique cultural history of modern financial markets from the early eighteenth century to the present day, the book offers a genealogical reading of the historical insecurities, debates, and controversies that had to be purged from nascent credit practices in order to produce the image of today's coherent and - largely - rational global financial sphere. Marieke de Goede discusses moral, religious, and political transformations that have slowly naturalized the domain of finance. Using a deft integration of feminist and poststructuralist approaches, her book demonstrates that finance - not just its rules of personal engagement, but also its statistics, formulas, instruments, and institutions - is a profoundly cultural and politically contingent practice. When closely examined, the history of finance is one of colonial conquest, sexual imagination, constructions of time, and discourses of legitimate (or illegitimate) profit making. Regardless, this history has had a far-reaching impact on the development of the modern international financial institutions that act as the stewards of the world's economic resources. De Goede explores the political contestations over ideas of time and money; the gendered discourse of credit and credibility; differences among gambling, finance, and speculation; debates over the proper definition of the free market; the meaning of financial crisis; and the morality of speculation. In an era when financial practices are pronounced too specialized for broad-based public, democratic debate, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith questions assumptions about international finance's unchallenged position and effectively exposes its ambiguous scientific authority.
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Wheel of Fortune
The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia
Thane Gustafson
Harvard University Press, 2012

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year on Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Republics

The Russian oil industry—which vies with Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer and exporter of oil, providing nearly 12 percent of the global supply—is facing mounting problems that could send shock waves through the Russian economy and worldwide. Wheel of Fortune provides an authoritative account of this vital industry from the last years of communism to its uncertain future. Tracking the interdependence among Russia’s oil industry, politics, and economy, Thane Gustafson shows how the stakes extend beyond international energy security to include the potential threat of a destabilized Russia.

“Few have studied the Russian oil and gas industry longer or with a broader political perspective than Gustafson. The result is this superb book, which is not merely a fascinating, subtle history of the industry since the Soviet Union’s collapse but also the single most revealing work on Russian politics and economics published in the last several years.”
—Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs

“The history of Russia’s oil industry since the collapse of communism is the history of the country itself. There can be few better guides to this terrain than Thane Gustafson.”
—Neil Buckley, Financial Times

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