Ray Dalio mentions in his Big Debt Crises book that he did this by reading through newspaper archives. Obviously this has some shortcomings—not a lot of consistent quantitative data (other than asset prices), comes with a lot of interpretation from the writers, the writers are journalists, only works for relatively recent history, etc. But it seems like a great way to learn what sounded reasonable to laymen at the time.
Ray Dalio mentions in his Big Debt Crises book that he did this by reading through newspaper archives. Obviously this has some shortcomings—not a lot of consistent quantitative data (other than asset prices), comes with a lot of interpretation from the writers, the writers are journalists, only works for relatively recent history, etc. But it seems like a great way to learn what sounded reasonable to laymen at the time.