He offers a vivid picture and unique insight and perspective on the significance of the emerging new financial genre and the impact that it was having and would continue to have on the extraordinary American emotional and financial interest in Wall Street and the stock markets. Highly recommended. Choice Reading the Market offers many evidentiary and analytical gems... A provocative and well-written study, this book also adds new dimension to our understanding of the literatures and popular culture of American finance. Knight's model literary analysis should provide ample material for students of American studies and cultural history, and could easily be incorporated into advanced undergraduate and graduate-level coursework. H-Net Reviews
Introduction: Mind the GapâWhy Reputational Risk Matters
Chapter 1: A Reputational Risk Framework
Chapter 2: A Reputational Risk Framework
Chapter 3: Effective Crisis Management Part 1: Getting Ahead of a Crisis
Chapter 4: Effective Crisis Management Part 2: Defining Roles And Responsibilities
Chapter 5: Effective Crisis Management Part 3: From Chaos to Managed Process
Chapter 6: Crisis Communications
Chapter 7: Redefining Issues Management
Chapter 8: The Role of Leadership In Crisis
Chapter 9: Frameworks and Models to Manage Reputational Risk
British Association for American Studies Book Prize Winner, 2016â17
Americans pay famously close attention to âthe market,â obsessively watching trends, patterns, and swings and looking for clues in every fluctuation. In Reading the Market, Peter Knight explores the Gilded Age origins and development of this peculiar interest. He tracks the historic shift in market operations from local to national while examining how present-day ideas about the nature of markets are tied to past genres of financial representation.
Drawing on the late nineteenth-century explosion of art, literature, and media, which sought to dramatize the workings of the stock market for a wide audience, Knight shows how ordinary Americans became both emotionally and financially invested in the market. He analyzes popular investment manuals, brokersâ newsletters, newspaper columns, magazine articles, illustrations, and cartoons. He also introduces readers to fiction featuring financial tricksters, which was characterized by themes of personal trust and insider information. The book reveals how the popular culture of the period shaped the very idea of the market as a self-regulating mechanism by making the impersonal abstractions of high finance personal and concrete.
From the rise of ticker-tape technology to the development of conspiracy theories, Reading the Market argues that commentary on the Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1915 changed how Americans understood financeâand explains what our pervasive interest in Wall Street says about us now.
"Offers a vivid picture and unique insight and perspective on the significance of the emerging new financial genre and the impact that it was having and would continue to have on the extraordinary American emotional and financial interest in Wall Street and the stock markets. Highly recommended."âChoice
"This intriguing book illuminates much about markets and, particularly, about the 'culture of the market' as financial capitalism began its will to power in America."âCivil War Book Review
"Reading the Market offers many evidentiary and analytical gems . . . A provocative and well-written study, this book also adds new dimension to our understanding of the literatures and popular culture of American finance. Knightâs model literary analysis should provide ample material for students of American studies and cultural history, and could easily be incorporated into advanced undergraduate and graduate-level coursework."âH-Net Reviews
"Knightâs contribution in Reading the Market to the discussion of Americaâs financial past is powerful and persuasive. His larger work of personalizing its academic genealogy will have a lasting effect on the future scholarly reading of the marketâs past."âJournal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
"Excellently researched and intricately orchestrated. Reading the Market offers a fresh and original contribution to the history of capitalism, and also to Gilded Age history generally."âAmerican Historical Review
"Curating a rich assemblage of commercial, political, historical, and literary materials, Knight offers a welcome interdisciplinary study that contributes to the social studies of finance, the new history of capitalism, financial print culture, and visual studies in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era."âBusiness History Review
âJonathan Levy, University of Chicago, author of Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America