For nearly a century, the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and the Crash of 1929 have stood as standards by which we measure all other financial manias and crises. And yet, the Jazz Age stock market was unique. Both the rate of increase in stock prices and the extent of public participation in the stock market were exceptional by historical standards. Ever since, commentators have reflected upon the 1920s stock market, contemplating questions of price, value, and valuation.

In this lecture presentation by Organization of American Historians Lecturer Dr. Julia Ott, Associate Professor of History at the New School in New York City, she explores these questions: Why do the prices of assets fluctuate? Where does financial value come from? Her re-examination of the Great Bull Market of the 1920s reveals how financial values emerge from – and remake – their political, institutional, and ideological context. Changes in popular saving practices and in beliefs about financial securities and markets spurred the stock market in the 1920s.

The federal government’s campaigns to sell war bonds to fund the First World War set these transformations in motion. Distributors of corporate stock echoed those war loan drives after Armistice as they issued newly-credible promises about the bright future that mass investment would secure: renewed citizenship, social mobility and stability, and the reconciliation of democracy and industrial corporate capitalism. As the decade wore on, stocks grew more desirable- and valuable- as utopian narratives about mass stock-ownership circulated and credit flowed. Dr. Ott will be presenting remotely.