Money

And why they’re scared we might break up with their favorite appliance.

For economist Albert Hirschman, social planning meant creative experimentation rather than theoretical certainty.

Full employment could solve job discrimination and inadequate wages.

Private insurance companies have long dominated the provision of social security in the United States, but resistance is growing.

In the 60s and 70s, spiraling prices for staples like meat and gasoline wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy, thanks to political and policy mistakes.

The new note comes 125 years after the free silver movement tried—and failed—to use currency to forge a national identity.

Lewis Hine captured the misery, dignity, and occasional bursts of solidarity within US working-class life in the early twentieth century.

Business groups have always worked with both parties to support globalization and free trade.

Democracy requires something more than a handful of super-rich universities.

Why do so many politicians think people only work if threatened or forced into doing so?

Inflation isn't inexorably a bad thing. In fact, it used to be considered good.

How a grassroots movement of farmers laid the foundation for state intervention in the economy, challenging the slaveholding South.

Consumer activists taking on the companies that support former President Donald Trump can learn from the boycott that never ended.

Booker T. Whatley introduced the concept in the 1960s for struggling Black farmers, but his agricultural contributions have been excluded from the narrative.

The Biden administration’s proposed “child allowances” draw on the feminist thought of Crystal Eastman, who advocated “motherhood endowments” 100 years ago.

Dispelling myths of entrepreneurial exceptionalism, a sweeping new history of U.S. capitalism finds that economic gains have always been driven by the state.

The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of 20th-century nation states and financial systems.

Popular politics and reconstructing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

When factories created a population of tired workers, a new frontier in fatigue studies was born.

The 1918 flu pandemic helped to usher in the Hollywood studio system. Could Covid-19 transform the industry?

The domestic slave trade was no sideshow in our history, and slave traders were not bit players on the stage.

Conservatives have weaponized Americans’ desire to help to attack the social safety net.

A seven-point memo proposing control of the global insulin market.

Robert Mundell’s theories spawned decades of economic debate and still matter to the big ideas of today.

How the myth of the overburdened white taxpayer was made.

This plight dates back to the era of slavery.

Heavy industry once drove Pittsburgh’s economy. Now health care does—but without the same hard-won benefits.

A welfare state doesn't distort the market; it just makes government aid fairer.

The history of the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution is a story of sustained efforts to suppress it even as demand for slaves increased.

What's the matter with left-populism? A review of Thomas Frank's "The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism."