Savannah's Midnight Hour

In Lisa L. Denmark's telling, the midnight hour for Savannah, Georgia, came not in a garden but in a self-inflicted financial crisis in 1877, when the city government defaulted on its municipal debt. This is an urban history without describing the organic growth of neighborhoods or communities. Instead, Denmark focuses on municipal finance, investment strategies in transportation projects by city government intended to reduce future taxation and to extend Savannah's commercial control of its economic hinterlands, and the politics by which differing elites won control of the municipal corporation of the city. Principally a financial history, the story is filled with interesting descriptions of tax revenue and taxpayer revolts, bond issues and refinancing schemes, corporate boards and stockholder elections, and the successes and failures of steamship lines, canal enterprises, railroads, harbor dredging, swamp draining, and sewer construction. Interspersed are tales of municipal elections, national depressions, and local epidemics. Denmark's goal

Apportionment · Archaeology · Business · Corporation · Debt · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Government (linguistics · Local government · Midnight · Municipal corporation · Political science · Politics · Revenue · Finance · History · Law · Public Administration · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies