Money

Turning the history of capitalism into a morality tale about good guys and bad guys is tempting.

Americans have long demanded — and regularly received — debt relief from legislatures.

We should find inspiration in their goals today.

At the very beginning of the auto industry, no less than three radically different design-for-maintenance philosophies fought it out.

A foundational flaw of the United States.

How Henry Ford managed the formation of the Ford Motor Company.

Gas stations caused a $20 billion toxic mess — and it’s not going away.

The focus of labor history is often—unsurprisingly—workers’ organizations and what has made them thrive or languish. But employers organized, too.

Even throwing off of a colonial power, representative institutions, Protestantism, and local autonomy in school decisions did not produce an egalitarian system.

The history of food inflation during World War I, and the riots that halted it, show how capitalists take advantage of consumer expectations to price gouge.

The U.S. government’s redress program for Japanese Americans showed that the money matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters.

How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?

Two new books reveal the story of Stanford University’s early years to be rife with corruption, autocracy, incompetence, white supremacy, and murder.

To understand the proslavery defense of the 1850s, one must reckon with the proslavery Malthusianism articulated by Cooper in the 1820s.

The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.

The Robinson-Patman Act was supposed to prevent price discrimination — but consumers wanted cheap goods.

Far from spelling the end of anti-market politics, basic income proposals are one place where it can and has flourished.

The deep roots of the latest WGA strike.

Meet the self-help author who wanted to teach corporate America how to think.

Often forgotten today, the black populists and their acts of cross-racial solidarity terrified the planter class, who responded with violence and Jim Crow laws.

Popular accounts often trace the origins of forced penal labor to the post-Civil War South. But a vast system of forced penal labor existed in the antebellum North.

A new history examines the lost promise and fierce persecution of the IWW.

What is the Federal Reserve, and who put it in charge? Is there no other way to fight inflation? Just what the hell is going on here?

Stretching back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, writers and many others in the industry have fought for their rights as workers.

A companion to a new PBS film, "The Memorial Day Massacre," the first oral history exploring the murder of 10 workers in Chicago.

In 1967, Milton Friedman launched a counterrevolution in economics that overturned the Keynesian theory of inflation.

The Washington state law provides low-interest loans for down payments for those harmed by racially restrictive covenants.

US corporations, with universities as one of their stages, masqueraded as agents of Black solidarity while undermining the demands of African liberation movements.

More than fifty years after the Fair Housing Act, inequality and segregation persists. What went wrong?

A never-before-published tranche of letters reveals the white-collar racism that prevented the world’s most popular athlete from selling Fords.