When he fled Austria in 1934, Ludwig von Mises left behind a wealth of writings that, he supposed, were lost forever. Seized by the Nazi Gestapo, the papers were subsequently captured by the Soviet KGB and were archived in Moscow. Their discovery in 1996, by Professors Richard and Anna Ebeling of Hillsdale College, received widespread attention. In cooperation with Hillsdale College, Liberty Fund will make available these long-lost writings, many of which have not previously appeared in English, as part of a three-volume edition of selected writings by one of the unsurpassed economists of the twentieth century. In the first of the volumes to be published are contained separate previously unpublished works that Mises wrote from 1940 through 1944, when much of the world was at war. The papers include: Guiding Principles for the Reconstruction of Austria (1940); An Eastern Democratic Union: A Proposal for the Establishment of a Durable Peace in Eastern Europe (1943); Aspects of American Foreign Trade Policy (1943); Mexico's Economic Problems (1943); The Main Issues in Present-Day Monetary Controversies (1944), and; A Non-Inflationary Proposal for Post-War Monetary Reconstruction (1944).

Historians have long treated Reconstruction primarily as a southern concern isolated from broader national political developments. Yet at its core, Reconstruction was a battle for the legacy of the Civil War that would determine the political fate not only of the South but of the nation. In Gold and Freedom, Nicolas Barreyre recovers the story of how economic issues became central to American politics after the war. The idea that a financial debate was as important for Reconstruction as emancipation may seem remarkable, but the war created economic issues that all Americans, not just southerners, had to grapple with, including a huge debt, an inconvertible paper currency, high taxation, and tariffs. Alongside the key issues of race and citizenship, the struggle with the new economic model and the type of society it created pervaded the entire country. Both were legacies of war. Both were fought over by the same citizens in a newly reunited nation. It was thus impossible for such closely related debates to proceed independently. A truly groundbreaking work, Gold and Freedom shows how much the fate of Reconstruction—and the political world it ultimately created—owed to northern sectional divisions, revealing important links between race and economy, as well as region and nation, not previously recognized.