By the 1820's, New England was in ferment. Unitarianism had shattered the old religious orthodoxy and, while the Dedham case provided a material dowry for the new religion, the sermons of William Ellery Channing furnished a theology and creed. In politics the dogmas of regional Federalism were weakened and soon Daniel Webster was to celebrate the virtues of an embracing nationalism which Pickering and his fellow conspirators of an earlier period would have found incomprehensible. Along the Merrimack were arising the cotton-mill towns, symbols of a new industrialism. An old order was giving way to a new. Once begun, change accelerated and touched one by one the institutions and ideas of the region. Of the economic factors that gave momentum to this transformation, the railroad was the most important. For it was the railroad that after 1830 tied New England into the nation. No longer was it to be a fringe of Hanseatic ports communicating with the rest of the world and with America by sea; it was to become a section in a developing nation. When Emerson wrote of Massachusetts, “From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State,” he should have added that there was not a railroad. For the railroad, even though it may not have opened wider prospects, at least revealed different ones.

The problem of the origins of marine insurance is one of the most complicated and controversial questions in the history of business institutions. One cause of this confusion is the fact that the earliest documentary sources are often ambiguous and lend themselves to widely varying interpretations. The legal writers, who have done most of the research on the early history of insurance, have focused their attention upon certain documents of the late thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries. As these sources unfortunately give incomplete information, the results of all this research have been rather disappointing. The minute scrutiny with which the legal writers have examined the early documents has produced subtle and brilliant examples of textual criticism but has also given rise to conflicting theories which have confused the issues instead of clarifying them.

Isaac bronson was a highly successful financier of the Jacksonian era who was also one of the period's most original and influential banking theorists. Bronson accumulated his very considerable fortune in New York primarily by judicious personal money-lending operations on long-term bonds and mortgages at a cautious 7 per cent annual return, supplemented by successful ventures in land speculation. In addition to wealth, he had by the 1830's acquired a weighty reputation for sober financial conservatism and was regarded as an authoritative exponent of sound banking principles. Prominent in the financial community, he had long thrown his weight as a sound banking theorist against the “wild-cat” practices of the then rampant state banks. As controlling stockholder of the Bridgeport Bank for almost thirty years, and as president for much of that time, he prided himself on its successful weathering of the financial storms of the period.”

A Weakness often apparent in interpretations of economic history lies in failure to evaluate properly the factor of relative location and the mechanism of cultural diffusion through which it operates to affect the changing character of regions. In studies of the historical geography of New Zealand, for example, extant interpretations have both emphasized an almost teleological view of unilinear cultural descent and shown a strong tendency toward environmental determinism. Neither of these philosophies or approaches in the writing of history has proved satisfactory in itself, but, taken together (antithetical though they may seem), they have provided a deceptively simple interpretive base upon which there has been almost universal reliance.