John D. Rockefeller Jr., right, was the country's biggest taxpayer in 1923, when public disclosure of tax payments was required by law. President Calvin Coolidge, left, pushed Congress to repeal the disclosure law in 1926. This photo was taken in 1925.

Americans’ Taxes Used To Be Public — Until the Rich Revolted

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

How Polluting Industries Mobilized to Block Climate Action

Since its inception, the IPCC itself has been the target of corporate obstructionism.
Men engaged in the various stages of making glass bottles in London, 1888.

Workers Have Been Fighting Automation Ever Since Capitalism Began

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.
Collage of the U.S. Capitol, a factory, and the earth, connected by coins and price tag stickers.

How the Oil Industry Cast Climate Policy as an Economic Burden

For 30 years, the debate has largely ignored the soaring costs of inaction.
Workers working on ruins after the US Civil War, circa 1865.

The Abolitionist Legacy of the Civil War Belongs to the Left

The US Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property.
Robot with group of people at poker table

The Automation Myth

To what degree can we blame automation for deindustrialization and class decomposition?
Members of the Amazon Labor Union celebrating

How Did Amazon Workers Go Against a Rich Corporation and Win? Look Back 100 Years.

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.
Painting of people on a fishing boat

A Cosmic Lie

A conversation about "Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World."
Painting of duel between Charles de Lameth and the Marquis de Castries.

A Slap, Followed by a Duel

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.
Max Scherzer, a member of the MLBPA bargaining committee, throws a pitch on March 21, 2022.

Baseball's Labor Wars

MLB owners’ recent lockout was an effort to reverse the gains that players had won over decades of labor struggle. The owners failed.
Cleveland-Stevenson Tariff Reform Portrait Handkerchief

Tax Regimes

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.
Housewife Annie Driver of Hunstanton, Norfolk, scrubbing the floor, while a toddler plays with the water bucket, 1956.

NOW and the Displaced Homemaker

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.
Farmers harvest wheat near the village of Tbilisskaya, Russia, July 21, 2021. That nation’s farmers produce nearly a fifth of world wheat exports.

How High Energy Prices Emboldened Putin

Rupert Russell’s new book shows how the financialization of commodity prices worsens volatility and destabilizes geopolitics. It couldn’t be more timely.
A packed Betty Crocker test kitchen in 1935, image of women crowded around a counter.

The Unsung Women of the Betty Crocker Test Kitchens

For many Crockettes, the job was glamorous, fulfilling, and "almost subversive."
Photograph of Marian Brook, a fictional character in HBO's The Gilded Age

Philanthropy and the Gilded Age

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.
Woodcut illustration from 1934 economics textbook depicting people walking from tenement houses past an advertising billboard and straight to a loan office.

Bad Economics

How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance.
Map of the Baltimore B&O railroad

The B&O Railroad From Municipal Enterprise To Private Corporation

A cautionary tale about the costs and benefits of public/private partnerships.
Iron fence featuring mickey mouse shaped ornaments.
partner

Movie Studios Are Abandoning Russia, A Far Cry From How They Handled Nazi Germany

During World War II, movie studios went to pains not to alienate the Nazis.
People gathered around an electronic contraption with lightbulbs.

Ideas of the PMC

A review of three new books that in various ways track the rise of the "Professional Managerial Class."
Chlorodyne bottles and other medicines on display with a wooden background

Potions, Pills, and Patents: How Basic Healthcare Became Big Business in America

Basic healthcare in the 20th Century greatly impacted the way that the drug business currently operates in the United States.
An image of the weapon used during the Newtown school shooting is displayed while attorney Josh Koskoff speaks during a news conference.
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The Sandy Hook Settlement Could Transform the Centuries-Old Marketing of Guns

Since the mid-19th century, manufacturers have marketed guns to white men, especially young ones.
A political cartoon lampooning the “robber baron” monopolists’ exploitation of laborers, 1883

When Americans Liked Taxes

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.
An oil rig on the ocean.

Spillovers from Oil Firms to U.S. Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing

Smudging state–industry distinctions and retelling conventional narratives.
Art relating to the News Media by Beck & Stone.

News for the Elite

After abandoning its working-class roots, the news business is in a death spiral as ordinary Americans reject it in growing numbers.
Illustration of Silvia Federici in a picket line, by Jovana Mugosa.

Silvia Federici Sees Your Unpaid Work

The crisis that Federici identified in the 1970s has reached a boiling point.
WWII Advertisement that highlights price controls.

Price Controls, Black Markets, And Skimpflation: The WWII Battle Against Inflation

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.
Neil Young, on left, and UFC announcer and podcaster Joe Rogan.
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What The Neil Young-Joe Rogan Dust-Up Tells Us About The Music Industry

The music industry is thriving — but it’s not always trickling down to artists.
Illustrated cargo ship surrounded by a train loop.

How America’s Supply Chains Got Railroaded

Rail deregulation led to consolidation, price-gouging, and a variant of just-in-time unloading that left no slack in the system.
Picture of Maida Springer Kemp and two other young African American women colleagues.

Maida Springer Kemp Championed Workers’ Rights on a Global Scale

The Panamanian garment worker turned labor organizer, Pan-Africanist, and anti-colonial activist advocated for US and African workers amid a Cold War freeze.
English Quakers on a Barbados plantation

How 18th-Century Quakers Led a Boycott of Sugar to Protest Against Slavery

These Quakers led some of the early campaigns against sugar being produced by enslaved people.