Through EH.Net's Ask the Professor function, I have received the following inquiry for a graduate student in political science who is working on presidential rhetoric about the economy: I am working on a project that attempts to explain the different competing narratives the American public has relied upon (over the past two centuries) to explain the economy/state of economy/prospertiy of the nation. Ultimately, I argue that presidential economic stewardship becomes the dominant explanatory narrative of the American public in the later half of the twentieth century. I am struggling with the historical narratives and I am wondering if anyone has done any work on how lay people explained/perceived the economy in the nineteenth century. What stories did people use to explain the economy/prosperity and to what actors did they attribute responsibility/blame? Ross B. Emmett