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Before the eighteenth century, speculator meant roughly the same thing as spectator. He (the speculator was male) was a contemplative type, a watcher. But by the time of the American Revolution, its meaning had begun to change. Writing in 1776, Adam Smith felt the need to define “what is called the trade of speculation” for his readers. The “speculative merchant,” he explained, “exercises no one regular, established, or well known branch of business. . . . He enters into every trade when he foresees that it is likely to be more than commonly profitable, and he quits it when he foresees that its profits are likely to return to the level of other trades.” “Sudden fortunes” and sudden losses were the equally likely results. No longer an observer, the speculator had become a doer—and sometimes an undoer.

Smith called the speculative merchant a “bold adventurer.” Post-Revolutionary Americans had other names for him. Jobbers, jackals, and jockeys: these were but a few of the epithets leveled at the men who made fortunes out of paper. Their enemies, who were many, cast them as sharks, hawks, wolves: “artful” predators glutting themselves upon “honest” hardworking prey. They were diviners, reading entrails for a hint of what the future held, or alchemists, using thick smoke to mask the underlying hollowness of their promises. One Connecticut critic joked that the paper money speculators so loved should be emblazoned with the image of “Dr. Faustus paying the Devil for the black arts.”

	Perched atop an English saddle and sporting leather riding boots in this 1913 pose, Saburo Shindo literally sits astride the cultural diversity that marked his life as a Hiroshima-born Nebraskan restaurateur. An NEH preservation grant enabled the Stuhr Museum to assess 28,000 glass-plate negatives and 4,000 prints by photographer Julius Leschinsky.
	—Stuhr Museum of the Praire Pioneer. Photo by Julius Leschinsky

And confidence mattered. If they were gamblers, paper men were also believers in the unlikely new nation’s future greatness, and their faith—their bets—created capital that helped to make it so. It is no accident that so many of the country’s founders—George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris and William Duer—were brazen speculators of one kind or another. Under their leadership, Americans developed a reputation as a speculating people. “Were I to characterize the United States,” said one British traveler who toured the country in the 1790s, “it should be by the appellation of the land of speculation.”

	Felix Nadar’s gelatin silver print on paper of Sarah Bernhardt in Le Baiser is among the holdings of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. The collection, which includes Old Master prints and drawings, Italian Renaissance paintings, photography, ancient Mediterranean art, and American art, received NEH support for preservation and stabilization efforts.
	—Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, museum purchase

One note of discord marred Balbus’s moment of triumph, however. The Tiber rose from its banks during this time and inundated part of the city. Among the areas flooded was the site of Balbus’s theater, and indeed, Dio [Roman historian Cassius Dio] records that the waters were of such a considerable depth that Balbus was only able to enter his brand-new theater via boat. We can only imagine the inauguration ceremony that was held in the half-submerged theater, presumably with the celebrants clinging to the upper reaches of the cavea [theater seats given according to social hierarchy] while the boats that brought them bobbed about in the waters covering the stage. This apparently ignominious aspect of the ceremonies does not appear to have greatly detracted from Balbus’s glory, however, and seems to have been accepted by the participants as a matter of course.

Georgetown artist James Alexander Simpson painted this portrait of Yarrow Mamout in 1822. An enslaved African American, probably from Guinea, Yarrow signed his name on records following the Muslim convention of putting the last name first. He is in all likelihood buried in the garden of the property he owned on Dent Place, in one of Washington, D.C.’s now exclusive neighborhoods.. When Charles Willson Peale painted former enslaved African American and Georgetown resident Yarrow Mamout in 1819, he was interested in his storied longevity. But as flames engulfed the Georgetown Branch of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in April 2007, Jerry McCoy, curator of the Peabody Collection, was interested in longevity of a different sort, hoping to save and preserve, in addition to a later likeness of Yarrow, the invaluable collection of photographs, maps, land plats, and general ephemera for posterity. James Alexander Simpson painted this portrait of Yarrow Mamout in 1822. —Peabody Room, Georgetown Branch, DC Public Library Within a day, a disaster recovery team removed the items, which were then vacuum frozen. An estimated 90 percent of it was salvaged, comprising four hundred boxes placed on thirteen pallets and shrink-wrapped, weighing over nine thousand pounds. An NEH grant will help with the recovery and preservation of the materials, along with development of a disaster plan for the library and its special collections. That the Yarrow canvas survived shouldn’t come as a surprise. The portrait of an African American painted at this time in U.S. history was rare, and it had caught the attention of James H. Johnston of Washington, who researched Yarrow’s story for three years and wrote about him in the Washington Post. According to Johnston’s 2006 Post article, Yarrow himself was a survivor, having amassed a hundred-dollar nest egg for his retirement. Twice, merchants who held the money for him lost it when their businesses failed. Yarrow scraped and saved a third time, putting aside two hundred dollars, which he used to buy shares in Georgetown’s Columbia Bank, finally allowing him to support himself in retirement with the interest from his investment. Humanities, November/December 2008, Volume 29, Number 6 Subscribe to Humanities magazine hereSee www.neh.gov.