Money

Today's coronavirus pandemic has echoes in the yellow fever pandemic of the 1790s. Then, workers struggled with how to support themselves and their families.

In times of crisis, it has often been the wealthy who get bailed out.

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle has come to symbolize an era of muckraking and reform. But its author sought revolution, not regulation.

Restaurants have always been about more than feeding city residents. During the 1918 flu pandemic, they were kept open as sites of social solidarity.

Eighty years ago, U.S. industry mobilized in a big way during a crisis. We could do it again.

Citizenship used to demand sacrifice. Then we taught Americans to buy things instead.

Nicholas Lemann’s history of 20th century corporations, Transaction Man, shows how an unrelenting faith in the market and profit doomed the American economy.

What began as an attempt to find more job opportunities for historians went further and launched a new field.

The dark history of how coffee took over the world.

Lessons from a century ago.

Procedures drive the bottom line in our medical system.

The Trump administration appears ready to invoke the Defense Production Act to speed manufacture of essential goods like face masks.

The GE exec was known for his big personality. He should be known for the role he played in creating America's toxic corporate culture on a base of inequality.

Bernie Sanders pushed a measure through the House to require drugs funded by public research funds to be sold at a reasonable cost. The Senate shot it down.

Reflections on the problems with progressives’ central principle that activist government is the only mechanism able to solve a modern society’s problems.

Never-before-transcribed articles from Frederick Douglass’ Paper denounce capitalism and economic inequality.

In the antebellum South, the slave trader’s office was a site of desire.

100 years ago, it took a combination of salesman and dictator to launch a historic era for black teams.

Mr. Peanut embodies two seemingly-distinct but deeply-connected Virginian worlds; he is a product of the state’s agricultural and aristocratic traditions.

Paul Samuelson’s mathematical brilliance changed economics, but it was his popular touch that made him a household name.

History suggests the value of a broader understanding of patriotism, one that goes beyond saluting-the-flag loyalty and battlefield bravery.

The school has decided how much money we’re owed in reparations.

For the sake of justice and democracy, we need a progressive wealth tax.

At the local level, reparations for slavery are already being paid all over the country.

The men who made the cars could not afford to buy them.

Joe Biden was once a New Deal Democrat. Then he “evolved” and starting backing decades of Republican plans to cut Medicare and Social Security.

A new book argues that US history has been a struggle between monopoly and democracy, but fails to address class and labor when decoding inequality.

The ‘margarine wars’ explain the 19th-century struggle to regulate food.

Starting in the 1970s, groups like MOVE and Seeds of Wisdom have fought for the decolonization of urban space.

A new book, "Franchise," explains how black franchise owners became the backbone of the industry.