Footing the COVID-19 Bill: Economic Case for Tax Hike on Wealthy

There is a strong economic case for raising taxes on the rich to help repair public finances following the pandemic.
Doorkeeper at a meeting of the United Mine Workers of America in Wheelwright, Kentucky.

Before Operation Dixie

What the failed Southern labor movement teaches us about the rightward shift in US politics.
Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill

What We Still Get Wrong About Alexander Hamilton

Far from a partisan for free markets, the Founding Father insisted on the need for economic planning. We need more of that vision today.
Freight train traveling through grasslands.

Forty Years After Surface Freight Deregulation

The regulatory reforms of the railroad and trucking industries are models for evidence-based, bipartisan policymaking.
An illustration of a kid imagining going to space.

Selling the American Space Dream

The cosmic delusions of Elon Musk and Wernher von Braun.

From Keynes to the Keynesians

Socialised investment and the spectre of full employment.
Milton Friedman poses with a sculpture of himself.

Colossus Wears Tweed

A number of recent books blame the rise of neoliberalism on economists. But the evidence suggests it is still capital that rules.
light

The Historical Cost of Light

How difficult was it to obtain artificial light before the 19th century? Well...
Thorstein Veblen

The Gadfly of American Plutocracy

Far from a marginal outsider, a new biography contends, Thorstein Veblen was the most important economic thinker of the Gilded Age.
Drawing of head of lettuce

The Lettuce Workers Strike of 1930

Uniting for better wages and working conditions, a remarkably diverse coalition of laborers faced off against agribusiness.

The Storied History of Giving in America

Throughout American history, philanthropy has involved the offering of time, money and moral concern to benefit others, but it carries a complicated legacy.
Elegant Boardroom

The Limits of Telecommuting

Perhaps the lesson to take from this year of living online is not about making better technology. It’s about recognizing technology’s limits.
A man sitting on a table.

A More Perfect Union

On the Black labor organizers who fought for civil rights after Reconstruction and through the twentieth century.
A political cartoon of the panic, depicting mobs, drunkards, and class struggles.

Panic of 1837

The panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that triggered a multi-year economic depression.
Motorcycle vest embroidered with the words "Sagebrush Rebel."

Legacies of the Sagebrush Rebellion

A conversation about the roots of organized resistance to federal regulation of public lands in the American West.
A photograph of Ben Fletcher

Ben Fletcher's One Big Union

The hugely influential but largely forgotten labor leader Ben Fletcher couldn’t be more relevant to the most urgent political projects of today.
cartoon drawing of street with for sale signs in front of every house

The Steal of the Century

How banks ripped off Americans, destroyed Black wealth, and got away with it.
A car being made in a car factory

Talking About Auto Work Means Talking About Constant, Brutal Violence

It's remembered as one of the best industrial jobs a worker could get in postwar America. Less remembered is how brutal life on the factory floor was – and still is.
A picture of Boston being modernized through urban development, construction is happening on several buildings.

How Did American Cities Become So Unequal?

A new history of Ed Logue and his vision of urban renewal documents the broken promises of midcentury liberalism.
Abandoned Howard Johnson's restaurant overgrown with vegetation.

Howard Johnson’s, Host of the Bygone Ways

For more than seven decades American roads were dotted with the familiar orange roof and blue cupola of the ubiquitous Howard Johnson’s restaurants and Motor Lodges.

The World Henry Ford Made

A new history charts the global legacy of Fordist mass production, tracing its appeal to political formations on both the left and the right.
Free Banking Era five dollar bank note from Michigan.

When the Secret Service Was Only Interested in Money

In certain corners of the internet, you can actually buy money, but these bills are relics of the Free Banking Era that reigned from the 1830s to the 1860s.

Thirty Glorious Years

Postwar prosperity depended on a truce between capitalist growth and democratic fairness. Is it possible to get it back?
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As Evictions Loom, Cities Revisit a Housing Solution From the 70s

Proposals giving tenants the right to purchase their building are being revived as Covid-19 puts renters at risk.
1912 political cartoon of the Aldrich Plan depicted as an octopus with tentacles on a bank, a factory, and a farm while spitting coins into the NYSC.

A Popular History of the Fed

On Populist programs and democratic central banking.
A white picket fence

Why Does Everyone in America Think They’re Middle Class?

The “Middle Class Nation” and “American Exceptionalism” found each other late, and under specific circumstances.
Drawing of people picking cotton at a plantation

A Few Random Thoughts on Capitalism and Slavery

Historian James Oakes offers a critique of the New History of Capitalism.
Postal workers comfort each other after a 1991 mass shooting

“I Understand Why He Did It”

On the origins of "going postal."

Eric Williams' Foundational Work on Slavery, Industry, and Wealth

Reflecting on "Capitalism and Slavery" (1944), a work that continues to influence scholarship today.
A motel that burned down in the Pacific Northwest wildfires, with a melted sign seen through orange smoke.
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Scapegoating Antifa for Starting Wildfires Distracts from the Real Causes

Radicals have long been blamed for wildfires in the Pacific Northwest.