Money

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.

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.