Investing in Life

A meticulous history of a significant but understudied event in the making of liberalism, the invention of life insurance.

Murphy has filled a gap in the historiography of American life insurance by mining the records of several companies that shaped the industry from 1830 through the Civil War... In pursuing her arguments, she discloses an impressive array of insights that shed light on American business and culture more generally.

In this sparkling volume, Sharon Ann Murphy makes an enormous contribution to scholarship in a wide range of fields... Murphy’s careful and close examination of life insurance as a new and vital safety valve for thousands of emerging middle-class households touches on just about every niche in the historical panorama... I highly recommend this wide-ranging and multifaceted survey of the rise of the life insurance sector, its customers, and its beneficiaries.

This under described state is the part of what makes Investing in Life so rewarding, but the book is carefully crafted enough to hold its own in any case.

A highly readable book detailing the rise of the American insurance industry up to and through the Civil War... Important and provocative.

A very thorough examination of the birth and growth of the life insurance industry in America from the early 1800s through the Civil War. The author's research is exceptional... In short, this excellent book provides a look at matters of life and death in the Civil War era that you may not have considered before.

Investing in Life represents absolutely first-rate research into the early history of the American life insurance industry. Murphy has dug deeply into corporate archives, the insurance and wider business press, metropolitan newspapers, and appellate legal opinions. The result is a deft reconstruction of the evolution of corporate strategies for marketing and organization, as well as the ambivalent popular responses to life insurance, especially among the urban middle class.