ABSTRACT
The period from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s was dominated by methodological debates and the autonomization of economics from neighboring fields and scholarly enterprises. In this process of "academicization" or "disciplinarization", economics migrated from salons and learned societies to universities and other higher education establishments. Columbia University was one of the era's three major mainstream institutions in political economy, and it boasted three of its most influential economists: Seligman, Clark, and Mitchell. In 1900, W. E. B. DuBois published his visionary work The Souls of Black Folk, which included estimates of the contribution of black people to the economy, noting how much less was received in payment as was produced in profits. Although there was tremendous variety in economic thought during this turbulent period, a great deal of it would prove shallow, evaporating with the emergence of the Great Depression and the New Deal.
