An instructive guide to stock market bubbles

The Baker Library of the Harvard Business School offers a resource-rich web site, as I discovered when The Wall Street Journal announced that historical examples from its "Pepper...and Salt" cartoons were on view.

The Baker Library's other offerings include an extensive online exhibit relating to stock market bubbles, illustrating that The South Sea Bubble and the Dot Com Bubble were sisters under the skin. Here's a sample from the exhibit, showing early 18th-century stock jobbers, as traders then were known. (Yes, women of the day pawned their pearls and rushed to buy stocks!)