Money

In 1873, greed, speculation and overinvestment in railroads sparked a financial crisis that sank the U.S. into more than five years of misery.

The first UAW strike was in the 1930s. Over the next century, the union amassed significant power while demanding higher wages, better benefits and protections.

By thinking big, Shawn Fain is summoning memories of Walter Reuther and the autoworkers’ union’s finest hour.

The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation.

Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Tillerson era.

On the history of whaling and how we understand energy consumption.

Kate Mullany's former home in Troy, New York honors one of the earliest women's labor unions that sought fair pay and safe working conditions.

Hudson Yards received a $6 billion cocktail of public subsidies, including tax breaks and infrastructure improvements, to create a billionaires' playground.

Malcolm Ross is unknown today. That’s too bad. This son of privilege has much to teach us about labor and civic leadership.

On the centrality of the working classes to the Arab American immigrant experience and the pivotal roles Arab Americans played in American labor.

The 1941 strike, following the spectacular success of “Snow White,” stunned Walt Disney and rattled his now-storied company.

A re-examination of the Age of Exploration may have more than a little to teach us about modern venture capitalists.

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

The study of poverty has flourished in recent decades. Why haven’t the lives of the poor improved?

Many of the reasons for strikes now mirror the motives that workers had for walking off the job in decades past.

“We could afford to end poverty,” Matthew Desmond tells us. That we don’t is a choice.

Florida’s new standards for teaching social studies include throwbacks to an interpretation of slavery as benign or inconsequential.

The welfare rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s resisted invasive policies. Their animating vision: that society treat every mother and child with dignity.

Twelfth-century peasants developed commons practices to survive domination. We could use them to reclaim our lives from capitalism.

Municipal governments today hold around $4 trillion in outstanding debt. The growing costs of simply servicing their debt is cannibalizing their annual budgets.

A new chronicle of redwood logging exposes how a cadre of wealthy industrialists reaped a fortune in the name of environmentalism.

Labor radicals played a crucial role in organizing the struggles to topple gender hierarchies, and should serve as an inspiration for labor feminists today.

What it means to be a Black worker in the time since slavery.

Thoreau’s loafing and the purpose of life.

Stars of the movie about an iconic Mattel toy are on strike. Both the company’s history and Barbie’s plot illuminate how powerful corporations really are.

The actual, and mythic, roles played by Irish immigrants in New York now fed the imaginations of the young Irish immigrants carving space for themselves in the 1980s.

The ruthless logic driving our economy can be traced back to 19th-century Palo Alto.

The free market used to be touted as the cure for all our problems; now it’s taken to be the cause of them.

On Darryl Holter and Stephen Gee’s “Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City, 1900–1930.”

The 2007–2008 crisis was an epic clusterfuck. The rise of private equity has only made things worse.