The biggest retail sale of the year—known as Black Friday—has been a Thanksgiving staple for decades. Although, the term “Black Friday” did not always refer to post-Thanksgiving deal shopping. It actually used to be applied to the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869.

According to History.com , Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, two notoriously harsh Wall Street financiers, conspired to purchase vast amounts of the nation's gold. Their goal was to artificially inflate the price and then sell it for immense profits. However, the conspiracy collapsed that Friday in September, triggering a stock market free-fall that bankrupted people across the economic spectrum, from Wall Street barons to ordinary farmers.

The widely spread explanation for the Black Friday shopping tradition often c

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