Money

Alternative currencies flourish in desperate times and situations.

The enduring legacy and capacious vision of Black Reconstruction.

Jim Ruland’s book on the legendary punk label helps explain why we lack a meaningful counterculture today.

Historian Daina Ramey Berry's April 2022 congressional testimony on the role of banks and insurers in US slavery.

Thanks to the efforts of wealthy taxpayers, the "big reveal" of the 1920s was extremely short-lived.

Since its inception, the IPCC itself has been the target of corporate obstructionism.

Automation didn’t start in the age of robots and microchips, but can be traced back to the late 19th century glass industry and its skilled glass workers.

For 30 years, the debate has largely ignored the soaring costs of inaction.

The US Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property.

To what degree can we blame automation for deindustrialization and class decomposition?

We don’t need to overanalyze it. It came down to genuine solidarity that the Amazon Labor Union organizing committee built among themselves and their co-workers.

A conversation about "Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World."

Dueling was a dangerous, ritualized response to a real (or perceived) slight. It may also have been a means of proving one's social and economic capital.

MLB owners’ recent lockout was an effort to reverse the gains that players had won over decades of labor struggle. The owners failed.

Historian Robin Einhorn reflects on Americans’ complicated relationship to taxes, from the colonial period through the Civil War to the tax revolts of the 1980s.

In the 1970s, NOW began to ask hard questions about the women who were no longer "homemakers", displaced from the only role they were thought to need.

Rupert Russell’s new book shows how the financialization of commodity prices worsens volatility and destabilizes geopolitics. It couldn’t be more timely.

For many Crockettes, the job was glamorous, fulfilling, and "almost subversive."

As the HBO series The Gilded Age suggests, charity allowed wealthy women to play a visible role in public life. It was also a site of inter-class animosity.

How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance.

A cautionary tale about the costs and benefits of public/private partnerships.

During World War II, movie studios went to pains not to alienate the Nazis.

A review of three new books that in various ways track the rise of the "Professional Managerial Class."

Basic healthcare in the 20th Century greatly impacted the way that the drug business currently operates in the United States.

Since the mid-19th century, manufacturers have marketed guns to white men, especially young ones.

The idea of liberty has often seemed to mean freedom from government and its spending. But there is an alternate history, one just as foundational and defining.

Smudging state–industry distinctions and retelling conventional narratives.

After abandoning its working-class roots, the news business is in a death spiral as ordinary Americans reject it in growing numbers.

The crisis that Federici identified in the 1970s has reached a boiling point.

To control inflation during WWII, the U.S. government resorted to wide-ranging price controls. Unintended consequences may be the reason they aren't used today.