FORGOTTEN AMERICAN WISDOM · THE ARCHIVE SERIES

Where Every Number Comes From

Every source named in the volumes and the bonuses · last updated July 2026

Every table in our books names its source in the small print beside its title. This page carries that same list, out in the open, so you can check us before you ever hand us a dollar — not after.

What is here is the union of the two sources chapters printed inside the books, with the entries that both volumes share written once. Nothing a volume cites is left off this page. Where a book names a table, a bulletin number or a printed page, so does the entry below; where the book deliberately gives no page number — because the pagination could not be checked against a page image — the entry says so here too, in the same words.

Most of these records are free to read online this minute. Where a public scan exists and we have opened it ourselves, the link is right there beside the entry. Where one doesn’t — or where we could not confirm a stable public address — the entry stands with no link and says so plainly. We would rather leave a blank than send an older reader to a dead page.

If you find a figure in one of our books that doesn’t trace to the source named beside it and listed here, write to contact@oldwisdombook.com — a person answers. We correct the record in the next edition, and we thank the person who caught it.

The price bulletins — Bureau of Labor Statistics

The government wrote down what things cost, year after year, for seventy-five years. These are the volumes it wrote them in.

The Census Bureau and Historical Statistics

One book holds most of the long series — the Bicentennial edition of Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. Its chapters are scanned as separate files; the three we lean on are linked here.

Paychecks, incomes, and relief

Houses, land, and the mortgage

The best evidence in these books about what a house cost and who could borrow for one comes from the agency that insured the loan — and it is the narrowest, because an insured buyer is not the whole country. The books say so on the page.

Fuel, the mails, and the bond

Banks, clubs, and scrip

The places ordinary money actually sat before it sat in a checking account.

The mutual purse — the circle, the charter, the lodge, the debit man

Four instruments, one idea, and a record that is uneven on purpose: the federal papers say plainly where no count exists, and the book repeats them rather than filling the hole.

The two counters — layaway and the trading stamp

Her own money — the farm surveys, the statutes, the credit desk

Credit, pensions, and taxes

Statutes and decisions

Schooling — the courses of study behind the bonus

The Kitchen-Table Curriculum quotes what the government actually printed about what children were to be taught. Every one of these is a federal or state document.

The catalogs

The household books of the period

Not advice from us — the books families actually kept on the shelf. All published before 1931 and therefore in the public domain; every one of them can be read free, in full, right now.

The USDA and the wartime kitchen

Farmers’ Bulletins were revised and reprinted for decades under the same number. Where the freely scanned copy is a later printing than the edition we worked from, the printing year of the scan is stated — so you know exactly what you are opening.

Cloth, mending, and the home flock

The voices — the Federal Writers’ Project

When a person in our books speaks, that person was really interviewed, by name, in the year given. Most of them were interviewed by the federal government during the Depression, and the manuscripts are online, free, in the interviewer’s own typing.

The plates — public-domain documents, with their provenance

Every document reproduced in the Archive is a public-domain original: a federal work, or something published before 1931, or a Library of Congress item marked “no known restrictions on publication.” Nothing else gets in. Here is each one, with the reason it may be reproduced and the address of the copy we worked from.

How the conversions are made

Old money is turned into today’s money with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own Consumer Price Index — no house formula, no rounding in our favor. This edition’s basis is May 2026 = 335.123, the latest month published when it went to press, and the method is printed inside the book so you can redo any line yourself.

Prices are national or principal-city averages unless a caption says otherwise; the price at any one counter, on any one day, varied. Where the source itself calls a figure an estimate, we call it an estimate too. A ratio — a house against a year’s income, a price against an hour’s wage — needs no conversion at all, and none is applied to one.

Works of the United States government are in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105); so are publications issued before 1931. Two of the papers above are neither, and it is worth being exact about it: the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia and Richmond are federally chartered corporations rather than federal agencies, so their research papers are their own property and not a government work. Their sites permit use for informational, educational and research purposes; we quote them with attribution, name the author and the paper at the point of use, and reproduce neither. The same holds for the handful of scholarly articles, the one company letter, and the reference works listed above: quoted briefly, attributed on the page, never reproduced.

Our compilation, conversions, tables, and design are our own work.

This is history, not financial advice.

These sources are the ones behind the Archive Series — the record of what things cost, and what people did about it. See the Archive →

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