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Mark W. Geiger is an economic historian and an independent scholar. He has been a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress and a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and at the University of Sydney. Before embarking on his PhD in history (University of Missouri, 2006), he studied at Carleton College and the Wharton School, and held positions in financial services on Wall Street and elsewhere. Much of his historical scholarship draws on his prior industry experience. His first book, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861-1865, describes a previously unknown banking conspiracy in Civil War Missouri. The plot failed, but set off a series of worsening consequences that ultimately cost thousands of people their property and sometimes their lives. His dissertation, on which the book is based, received the 2007 Nevins Prize, awarded by the Economic History Association. He is currently at work on a new book, Floor Rules: Insider Culture in Financial Markets, to be published by Yale University Press in 2024.
Winner of the 2011
Tom Watson Brown Book Prize in
Civil War History“On occasion one comes across a historical monograph so precise in its research design, so imaginative in its search for documentation, so innovative in its making connections between social and economic developments, and so evocative in its implications that one is left nearly wordless. Such is the work that Mark W. Geiger has produced.”
— Journal of Southern History“One of the finest monographs on the Civil War I have read in twenty-five years.”
— Mark E. Neely Jr., winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in history for The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil LibertiesFinalist and Honorable Mention for the 2011 Lincoln Prize in Civil War History