A housing and municipal construction bubble popped and generated a lending crisis in which interbank lending rates became impossibly high. The banking crisis, which spread across Europe and the United States, eventually impacted other industries, leading to a stock market crash and an economic contraction lasting several years. This was not in 2008, but in the 1870s. And Scotland's University of Glasgow was in the midst of a major fundraising campaign. Today's economic climate is a difficult one, but fundraising campaigns at universities in the U.K. have survived and succeeded during equally difficult times more than 100 years ago. The University of Glasgow, which undertook a campaign to rebuild the university at a new campus location during the late 19th century, serves as an excellent example. What the successful 19th-century campaign particularly emphasizes is that persistence is of utmost importance to the success of a campaign.