Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (full text)
by Walter Bagehot · Library of Economics and Liberty (Econlib)
Bagehot's 1873 account of how the London money market actually functioned and why a central bank must lend freely at a penalty rate against good collateral during a panic. Reading it makes every later central-bank crisis response legible rather than mysterious. Complete public-domain text, free online.
More resources on Financial History & Crises
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (FCIC Final Report)
The congressionally mandated commission's 2011 report on the causes of the 2008 crisis, built from over 700 interviews and millions of documents. Includes the majority findings and two dissents, so contested interpretations sit side by side.
Federal Reserve History
Reference site maintained by the Federal Reserve System covering US financial episodes from the 1790s First Bank through the 2008 crisis, with signed essays, primary documents, chronologies and biographies written by Reserve Bank economists and historians. The best free structured reference for the episode-by-episode spine of the topic — Panic of 1907, 1929, 1970s inflation, S&L, 2008.
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
Reinhart and Rogoff assemble eight centuries of sovereign default, banking crisis, inflation and currency-crash data across sixty-six countries, then show the quantitative regularities preceding collapse and the recurring belief that present conditions are somehow exempt. The empirical counterweight to narrative crisis history: it is the dataset, not the anecdote.
Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (8th Edition)
The canonical text of the field and the one book that supplies a reusable model rather than a single-episode narrative. Kindleberger's anatomy of a bubble — displacement, credit expansion, euphoria, distress, revulsion — applied across four centuries of manias from tulips to 2008. The eighth edition adds cryptocurrency and China's property bubble.