• Some potential sources for your short research papers (this list might be overkill, but it might still come in handy)
• Some books that will be on thee-hour reserve at Penfield Library by early September:
• Barrington, Linda. The Other Side of the Frontier. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.
• Egnal, Marc. A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
• Engerman, Stanley L., & Robert E. Gallman, editors. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States. Volume I: The Colonial Era.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.  (The book's chapters are by various economic historians and cover such topics as Native American economic history, indentured servitude, effects of British economic policies on the colonies, and the American Revolution.)
• Engerman, Stanley L., & Robert E. Gallman, editors. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States. Volume II: The Long Nineteenth Century.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The book's chapters are by various economic historians and cover such topics as slavery, industrialization, canals, and railroads.)
• Goldin, Claudia. Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Jones, Alice Hanson.  Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
• Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  
• Perkins, Edwin.  The Economy of Colonial America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

• Alas, these notes do not include graphs.  Here, however, are some related notes, courtesy of Prof. John Kane, with striking multi-colored graphics.  One would do well to take a look at these, too:
• Notes on supply, demand, pricing, and profits in a perfectly competitive market
• Notes on monopoly pricing and the dead-weight loss from monopoly
  

Web sites that may be of great help to your research paper:

• Economic History Services (EH.NET)
• Economics Research Guide, at Penfield Library.  In particular, try the EconLit link (scroll down to about halfway down the page to find it).
• The History Research Guide at Penfield Library may also be of use.  Remember that your focus is economic history.
• You be ILLin':  Penfield Library's Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service is a great way to get articles and books that the library itself doesn't have.  (Note:  You will need to sign up for this service first, though that's free.)

• U.S. Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions, 1854-Present
• Economist Greg Mankiw has some excellent, concise advice on "How to Write Well"
• Writer's Block also contains some helpful writing tips
• How to do really well in college (some great advice from Prof. Norm Weiner)
• An American history quiz based on James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me
• History News Network

• Wampum
• The North American colonies as of 1750 (Note how tiny British America is.)
• The thirteen original British colonies as of 1775, and the areas of settlement within them
• The Missouri Compromise: This map shows why Thomas Jefferson felt "like a fire bell in the night" that civil war could come
• The Confederate States of America:  Slaves as % of population vs. Date of secession
• The reaper:  Cyrus McCormick's reaping machine, patented in 1834, helped to revolutionize American farming later in the 19th century
• Land grants to railroad companies (the thick one at the top was to the Northern Pacific; it was 100 miles wide, 2,000 miles long
• The great railroad strike of 1877
• The Haymarket Square bombing and riot in Chicago, 1886
• State militia on their way to break up the Homestead Strike, 1892
• Rioters burning 600 freight cars after the Pullman Strike of 1894
• Map of manufacturing areas 1900
• Barnard College History Department E-Resources
• Teaching American History: includes a host of images, audio clips, and video clips
• Populism Political Cartoons (PowerPoint slides; author unknown)
• Two more sites of 1896 and Populism political cartoons, and my EH.NET review of both sites 

• "The Housing-Bubble Revolution," a New York Times article (30 Nov. 2008) about some current economic history research about the colonial depression of the 1760s as a precursor to the Revolutionary War. It contains quite a bit about the role (or lack thereof) that historians tend to assign to economics in their explanations of the war.
• "Freakoutonomics," by Charles L. Morris, a New York Times op-ed (2 June 2006) about the 1870s depression that wasn't.  Or was it?.