The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression tells the story of the first nationwide economic collapse to strike the United States. Much more than a banking crisis or real estate bubble, the Panic was the culmination of an economic wave that rolled through the United States, forming before the War of 1812, cresting with the land and cotton boom of 1818, and crashing just as the nation confronted the crisis over slavery in Missouri.

The Panic introduced Americans to the new phenomenon of boom and bust, changed the country's attitudes towards wealth and poverty, spurred the political movement that became Jacksonian Democracy, and helped create the sectional divide that would lead to the Civil War. Although it stands as one of the turning points of American history, few Americans today have heard of the Panic of 1819, with the result that we continue to ignore its lessons—and repeat its mistakes.
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Andrew H. Browning was educated at Princeton University and the University of Virginia. He has taught history in Washington, DC, Honolulu and Portland, OR, and he has been a Virginia Governor's Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar. His first book is The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression, which was recently nominated for the Cundill History Prize. His next book about the political education of early America's political class, Schools for Statesmen, will be released next year.
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Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.