2005 Robert E. Wright, The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance HB/DJ First Edition VG/VG

Robert E. Wright, The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance, University of Chicago Press, 2005, HB/DJ First Edition VG+/VG+

Description excerpted from the U. Chicago Press:

During the dawn of the Republic, Philadelphia was the center of American finance. The first stock exchange in the nation was founded there in 1790, and around it the bustling thoroughfare known as Chestnut Street was home to the nation’s most powerful financial institutions.  

The First Wall Street reveals how the city played a leading role in the financing of the American Revolution and emerged from that titanic struggle with not just the wealth it forged in the crucible of war, but an invaluable amount of human capital as well.

This capital helped make Philadelphia home to the Bank of the United States, the U.S. Mint, an active securities exchange, and several banks and insurance companies—all clustered in or around Chestnut Street. But as the decades passed, financial institutions were lured to New York, and by the late 1820s only the powerful Second Bank of the United States upheld Philadelphia’s financial stature.