Almost 8 trillion dollars: the size of the US national debt in the early twenty-first century. In this ambitious, four-volume edition Robert E Wright, a leading advocate of the finance-led growth hypothesis, assembles a broad selection of rare primary resource materials in the form of essays, reports, books and compendia informing on US public finances in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He investigates the debates put forward, from which comparisons with today's debt can be drawn.