Brendan Greeley

Absolutely.

Death was a moment of settlement.

When you look at the Maryland Gazette, which was the newspaper in Annapolis in the 18th century, what you see are a lot of death notices.

And the death notices say, clear your accounts with this person.

And a lot of what we know about the economy of that era comes from looking at, you know, summaries of wealth at the moment of death.

And the summary of wealth would at the bottom, you know, list every asset that you had.

At the very bottom, it would say debits and credits, people who owed you money and people whom you owed money.

And there's this great story of Anne Catherine Green, who was the wife of Jonas Green, who was the state printer or the provincial printer of Maryland.

Jonas Green died.

He seemed to have been a generous man with credits.

So a lot of people had book credits that they owed Jonas Green for printing jobs that he'd done for them.

And Catherine Green absolutely knew how a printer's office worked.

The next day after he died, she put another edition of the paper out, said, hi, I'm your new printer.

By the way, many of you owe my husband money.

Remember that I own a newspaper, and if you do not clear your debts with me on the occasion of his death, I will print your names in this newspaper.

very sharp woman, and then use that to buy her house free and clear.

Yeah, I'm guilty.

Look, I've worked within that system.

I was a Fed reporter.

And I understand the job of Fed reporter.