Money

In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy.

The history of the battle to keep Title IX out of college sports.

Advanced Placement testing is "a money-making racket that lets states off the hook for underfunding education."

Planning, market coordination, and the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.

Autopsies of a changing publishing industry; frustrations with readers' tastes; and sympathies for poets and authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres.

"You're drinking something that some guy just cobbled together out of Lake Michigan water and food dye.”

Free trade has been defended primarily by neoliberals who cared little about social justice or democracy. An examination of its history paints a different picture.

Film and television writers face an existential threat.

An intellectual history of inequality in economic theory reveals the ideological reasons behind the field’s resurgence in the last few decades.

Christian moralists long promoted hobbies as a way to occupy idle hands, bringing the work ethic into free time. Today hobbies risk turning into side hustles.

A new history of labor organizing in Coachella tells us the story of the United Farm Workers and how its rank-and-file members drove the union to success.

A cartoon report on the only policy proven to address the housing shortage and how racism, inept management, and disinvestment led to long-term decline.

Even popular cookies can end up permanently cut from the roster.

Female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds fought to tell their own stories.

The history of grassroots banking politics has been overlooked — and even denied.

Right from the beginning, a commercial spirit and the wealth it generated were essential to creating and constituting America.

While the concept stretches back centuries, it has garnered significant attention in recent decades.

The turbulent history of an often forgotten moment that would leave blood in the streets and shape the modern landscape of Chicago.

America’s favorite gun.

Before being pushed aside by the NCAA, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women governed women’s college athletics.

The venerable movie studio once defined the industry's zeal for consolidation, pioneering vertical integration and serving as the model for its major rivals.

One academic tells the story behind his new book -- and his next one.

A review of three new studies about how race and class intersect.

In pre-Civil War Richmond, Black people were forced to literally pay for the mechanisms of white supremacy.

While engagement or wedding rings are certainly not a new idea, the prevalence of diamonds is a more recent phenomenon.

40 years ago in Chicago, McMaid workers sparked a movement.

The recent history of copyright in music cannot be separated from the rise of technologies for the recording and transmission of content online.

An interview with Jennifer Burns on her authoritative new biography of the American economist and the personal and intellectual origins of his theories.

Economists and historians have been telling us the wrong story about Continental currency for two centuries.

Introducing a project on US labor history, exploring what we can learn from 1930s-1950s industrial struggles.