Richard T. Stillson
Dr.
Richard T. Stillson was interviewed
for BookCast by Fairfax County Public Library Director Sam
Clay.
Stillson, the author of Spreading the Word: a History of Information in the California Gold Rush, has Ph.D.s in both economics and history and has published articles on the theory and history of information in financial markets. He teaches history at George Mason University.
Spreading the Word examines the ways in which easterners who traveled west during the California gold rush of 1849–51 obtained, assessed and used information. Since information was unreliable and the trip was dangerous, Stillson follows several gold rush companies across the country using their letters and diaries to get a sense of how they obtained information and evaluated its constantly changing sources; how they attempted to learn where gold was; and what they wrote home, thus providing information to the next wave of gold seekers.
According to one reviewer, “To paraphrase Senator Howard Baker in 1973, ‘What did the prospective gold miners know, when did they know it, how did they assess its credibility, when did they realize it was wrong, what did they do to compensate and how did they determine what informants and information to trust?’ That is the basic plot of this fascinating tale.”