AR-15 with the American flag attatched.

The Curse of the AR-15

How the gun became a cultural icon—and unmade America.
Shot of Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio hugging in Killers of the Flower Moon

Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon Describes the Struggles of the Osage People

Here’s why they are still fighting.
Quarter teetering on the edge of a plank of wood

The 1970s Economic Theory That Needs to Die

Turns out you can tame inflation without triggering a recession. Will the Federal Reserve accept the good news?
The low water level at Woodhead reservoir.

The “Tragedy of the Commons” Is a Dubious, Right-Wing Concept

The environmental crisis isn’t the result of the “tragedy of the commons.” It’s the result of the commons’ theft and privatization for profit.
View of a Boston Street, circa 1778.

Commissary Notes and the Dark History of Revolutionary Financing

From the outset of the American Revolution, a lingering problem that plagued the minds of the Continental Congress dealt with its financing.
Photo of college graduates throwing their caps in the air.

Borrowed to the Hilt

President Biden’s SAVE plan isn’t going to rescue the tens of millions of Americans that together owe more than $1.7 trillion.
Meeting of the Maguire Men outside a coal mine

Making Sense of the Molly Maguires Today

Who were the Molly Maguires, what did they do, and why did they do it?
President Clinton walks with Jiang Zemin past rows of Chinese soldiers.

It’s the Global Economy, Stupid

A new book on the Clinton presidency reveals how it abandoned a progressive vision for a finance-led agenda for economics and geopolitics.
Hand facing palm up and holding three pills.

Unreasonable Terms

How American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.
Children in a Head Start classroom look out a window at others in the playground.
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America Already Knows How to Address Child Poverty

The history of Head Start shows that child poverty is a choice.
Coke bottle littering a beach.

How Coke Killed the Refillable Bottle

Coke knew their plastic would trash the planet…and did it anyway.
Loggers standing next to logs floating down a river in the Oregon forests

Water Logs

Log drivers once steered loose timber on rivers across America before railroad expansion put such shepherds out of work.
The Yuchi people dressed for hunting

What a Historical Analysis of Gunpowder Can Teach Us About Gun Culture in the United States

An understanding of the history of gunpowder might be able to tell us how and why guns have become so widely accessible in the present-day United States.
Cover of "The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination" featuring a dragon with its tentacles entrapping people.

Between The Many and The One

Stephanie Mueller´s book sheds light on the percieved death of liberalism and the fear of corporations.
The "fangs" of private equity dripping blood on the U.S. economy.

Conspicuous Destruction

Two books argue that private equity created an economic order in which getting rich quickly preempts other values, undermining companies and evading the law.
Photo of surgeons performing surgery in a dimly lit operation room.
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For Hospitals, ‘Nonprofit’ Doesn't Mean ‘Charitable’

Medical debt has always been part of the history of nonprofit hospitals.
UAW workers at a strike event.

Revaluing the Strike

Rather than viewing strikes as a last-resort bargaining tactic, the labor movement must embrace them as engines of political transformation.
AR-15 trigger, with banner of AR-15 on Confederate monument behind

How the AR-15 Became an American Brand

The rifle is a consumer product to which advertisers successfully attached an identity—one that has translated to a particularly intractable politics.
A banner that reads "HTG: High Tech Gays," surrounded by a crowd of people and balloons.

How Work Has Shaped the LGBTQ Community

And the ways capital took advantage of the state's policing of sexuality.
Cotton plants.

Understanding Capitalism Through Cotton

Looking at the development of cotton as a global commodity helps us understand how capitalism emerged.

Eight and Skate

The age of optimism that lasted in the US from the 1940s to the 1970s looked, basically, like a car.

What Even Is "Leadership"?

And why won't all the worst people stop talking about it?
Protesters and tenants facing displacement hold placards as they attend a rally against private equity-backed firm Greenbrook Partners in Brooklyn, New York on October 15, 2021.

Shared Terrain

The neoliberal order has been exposed as fraudulent, inefficient, and inequitable. Yet it hardly lies in the dustbin of history.
United Auto Workers members at a rally.

UAW Strikes Built the American Middle Class

Today’s strikers are seeking to renew the broadly shared prosperity that earlier UAW work stoppages created.
The Northern Pacific Railway.

How One Robber Baron's Gamble on Railroads Brought Down His Bank

In 1873, greed, speculation and overinvestment in railroads sparked a financial crisis that sank the U.S. into more than five years of misery.
Woman strikers marching past vandalized factory building.

The Autoworker Strikes That Changed America

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.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain shaking hands with union members.

Can the UAW Transform America Again?

By thinking big, Shawn Fain is summoning memories of Walter Reuther and the autoworkers’ union’s finest hour.
Disney strikers picketing the premiere of The Reluctant Dragon, Los Angeles, July 1941.

Storyboards and Solidarity

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

Inside Exxon's Strategy To Downplay Climate Change

Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Tillerson era.
Front cover of Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling.

Underground Whales: An Energy Archaeology

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