The Panic of 1893

A Seattle business journalist’s ground-level account of the last depression of the nineteenth century as it hit a state four years old. Banks failed, sawmills closed, and money grew so scarce that Bellingham and Port Angeles issued their own; jobless men sawed wood and dug clams, Spokane’s richest man was wiped out, and protesters set out from Tacoma and Seattle for Washington, D.C. on foot and by stealing rides on freight trains. Ramsey built the book over four years from old newspapers, lawsuits, personal papers and the National Archives, which makes it a local-detail counterweight to the national-aggregate way the 1890s are usually told.

Why it’s on the list: A depression told at the scale of one new state’s banks, mills and towns — the texture that national financial history leaves out.

Where I saw it: @tylercosgrove’s October 15, 2025 list of 25 books he offered to send to Jared Kushner.

Connections

• Financial History — the section of the anti-library this sits in.
• Banking — bank failures are the book’s engine.
• Economic History — the regional, primary-source method.
• Bubble — the railroad-and-land boom that preceded the panic.