ABSTRACT
Bob Coats has provided an excellent survey of reasons that intellectual historians have given, or might give, for the Americanness of American economics. What seems to me-an institutional economist and economic historian-to be missing is sufficient attention to the ways in which specifically American economic problems shaped American economics. The influence of economic issues that have been especially American has tended to be obscured by the understandable tendency for historians of economic thought to focus on consistencies/inconsistencies of American thought with European (primarily English) thought. Even more important in obscuring the role that public issues in the United States have had on American economic thought has been the dominance of U.S. economic thought in the industrial world in this century, and particularly in the last half of the century. Let me illustrate with three examples of the way in which three specifically American episodes affected our texts, texts that came from America but have shaped thought elsewhere.
