Rajashri Chakrabarti, Amy Farber, and Max Livingston In two recent posts on New York and New Jersey and a series of interactive graphics, we explored the effect of the Great Recession on school district finances. But if we expand our scope a little wider, we see that school finances have been changing significantly over the […]

François Quesnay, an eighteenth-century brain surgeon and physician to France’s King Louis XV, was also the first to put economic data into a table.

The visual representation of information, knowledge, or data has been around since the time of the caveman.

In 1965, Baby-Boomer kids may have been treated to TV footage of a high-stepping chorus line and thousands of people cheering to the background tune “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Money has been a topic of keen interest throughout history.

Phrenology (see this amusing four-minute video), popular in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the study of skull shape and contours (believed to indicate the location of more- and less-developed areas of the brain) in order to discern individuals’ abilities and personality traits (called “faculties” in the phrenologists’ jargon).

In May 1953, an article from Kiplinger’s Changing Times titled “No, All Banks Are Not Alike” advised, “[Y]ou want a bank that is safe, convenient, pleasant to visit; one that offers all the regular banking services and makes reasonable charges for them; one that is well managed and competently staffed, and whose officers and tellers are friendly and willing to advise you on your major financial problems.”

In November 1965, the northeastern United States experienced a thirteen-hour blackout – the biggest in history to that date.

In 1720, the very same year that England was experiencing the “South Sea Bubble” (see our post), France was experiencing a bubble as well—the “Mississippi Bubble.”