Money

Ariel Ron discusses the rise of the agricultural state in his book, Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic.

Historian Davarian Baldwin explains how universities have come to wield the kind of power that were once hallmarks of ruthless employers in company towns.

Computers were supposed to reduce office labor. They accomplished the opposite.

FDR managed inflation during World War II through government policy. Today’s calamities call for a similar approach.

What role should the federal government play in building our infrastructure?

What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?

Finally embracing teachers' original vision could help us rethink education after covid.

Its legacy lives on today in the struggles faced by modern miners seeking workers' rights.

By documenting how public debt produced our present nightmare, Destin Jenkins allows us to dream about using public money to mend the ills of our era.

The discovery of oil and gas made members of the Osage Nation among the richest people in the world. But it also made them targets for exploitation.

An analysis of the factors that contributed to NYC's massive financial crisis in the 1970s, and the austere solutions that perpetuated it.

The daring women whose transatlantic journeys challenged gender roles.

In the contemporary United States, higher education does more to exaggerate than relieve class and cultural divisions.

Far from ushering in a zero-waste world, the switch from returnables to recycling provided cover for the creation of ever more packaging trash.

While they never intended for more than 45 million Americans to have this much debt, policymakers in the 1960s made fateful choices.

The KKK violently resisted the revolutionary gains of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and sought to keep the black masses toiling in submission.

A new history charts the forgotten ways the social politics of the Roosevelt years transformed the United States.

One of the most audacious examples of product placement at the Olympics was staged by John Carlos and Tommie Smith.

How the 33rd president finagled his way to a post–White House fortune — and created a damaging precedent.

The recent ProPublica exposé shows we need to attack the wealth and power of the rich — and that means massively increasing taxes on them.

In the two decades before the Hepburn Act’s enactment, two entities vied for the right to coordinate the price and distribution of coal.

It’s time for something better.

Newer measures of poverty may do a better job of counting America's poor, which is necessary to helping them.

The history of rural electrification demonstrates why vital public utilities cannot be left to the machinations of the market.

Fifty years ago, in response to rising inflation, he rejected several long-standing practices. His Keynesian turn holds lessons for today’s economy.

After over a century, the unelected mascot of St. Louis is finally losing its place in public life.

Long after the end of explicit discrimination in the housing market, the federal government continued to manage risk for capital, perpetuating inequality.

She used her work to live an autonomous life in a time when women were often trapped by socially constructed gender roles and systematic oppression.

The 19th-century antecedent to today’s complaints of labor shortage.

Patent medicine used to be associated with fraud and profiteering. What shifted the industry's positions on medical ethics and intellectual property?