Money

Brea Baker on Black land ownership, historical injustice, and the hope for Black Americans to own more than one percent of the land.

On the early years of the real estate industry, and the racist effort to convince white Americans to buy single-family homes.

The long arc of racist plunder through local tax codes is shocking—or, well, maybe it’s not, really.

By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Blair LM Kelley’s book, "Black Folk," helps tell the larger story of American democracy.

Monopolies across the grocery supply chain squeeze consumers and small-business owners alike. Big Data will only entrench those dynamics further.

Corporations sold Americans on the chasing arrows — while stripping the logo of its worth.

Human bondage was big business in the antebellum US, and men weren’t the only ones cashing in.

Why introductory economics courses continued to teach zombie ideas from before economics became an empirical discipline.

Do Americans in rural places really “marinate in a sense of loss and perpetual disappointment”?

A century ago, debates about the failed Child Labor Amendment turned on larger issues about work, childhood, and the role of government.

"The Reckoning," Robin Blackburn’s monumental history, offers a dizzying account of the politics behind slavery's rise and fall.

On how the fringe ideas of a set of American neoliberals became a new and pervasive way of life.

State-level rollbacks to child labor protections show the need for a constitutional amendment introduced 100 years ago.

New books examine the place of work in our lives—and how people throughout history have tried to change it.

Forged in the cauldron of Chicago’s streets and factories, born from the experience of workers in the mills and plants of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.

On the mechanics of Wall Street’s influence on key institutions of American democracy, from the New Deal to today.

The history of the property tax system and its structural defects that have led to widespread discrimination against Black Americans.

In which “the intellectual handmaidens of the capitalists” are taken to task.

By looking at the labor history of academia, you can see the roots of a crisis in higher education that has been decades in the making.

Americans have always borrowed, but how exactly did their lives become so entangled with the power of plastic cards?

It’s a great time to be in a union—but a terrible time to try to start a new one.

African American insurance and the actuarial double bind.

The Postal Savings System offered depositors a US government-backed guarantee of security, but it was undone by for-profit private banks.

The long history and contemporary relevance of war tax resistance.

How did taxes become something we "do"?

Why should taxpayers fund schools that violate their own values, the Moms for Liberty wonder? A new book traces how this kind of thinking about public spending came to be.

A look at the psychedlic-inspired music scene of Detroit.

Historian Robin Blackburn has completed a trilogy of books that provide a comprehensive Marxist account of slavery in the New World.

The US today has extraordinary levels of gun ownership. But to see this as a venerable tradition is to misread history.

On March 7, workers at the Ford Rouge River plant marched for better working conditions. Almost a century later, a quiet park honors their memory.