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Black wet nurses made a show of militance in 1937.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans replaced all its public schools with charter schools. A new book recovers the decades of work the storm disrupted.

Defining a social type is a way of defining an era. What can the time of the young urban professional tell us about our own?

On the life and times of Jason Epstein, cofounder of “The New York Review of Books.”

Sean O’Brien’s speech at the RNC may represent a return to nonpartisan realpolitik for unions. But does that reflect labor's strength or its decline?

High ideals have always gone together with economic self-interest in the history of the United States.

An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor is long overdue.

The moral terrain of crowdfunding is fueled by two persistent social ideologies: the dual, and intertwined, myths of meritocracy and the “deserving poor.”

Despite its failures and limitations, the American Revolution unleashed popular aspirations to throw off tyranny of all kinds.

The hard labor behind what was once one of the nation's most significant industries.

The peach industry represented a new, scientifically driven economy for Georgia, but it also depended on the rhythms and racial stereotypes of cotton farming.

The belief of first-generation Japanese immigrants in their racial superiority over Filipinos was a by-product of the San Joaquin Delta's white hegemony.

No one really knows how interest rates work—not the experts who study them, the investors who track them, or the officials who set them.

Tracing financial capital—from J. P. Morgan to BlackRock.

Black miners were intentionally erased from the record of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster. A new book reinserts them into the narrative.

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.

White women were especially likely to be owners involved in transactions with enslaved women, where they were listed as owners in nearly 40% of transactions.

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.