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Illustration of a man hunched over a computer at work and another leaning back relaxing; the two drawings are positioned so that it looks like the relaxing man is leaning on the working man.

Why Isn’t Everybody Rich Yet?

The twentieth century promised prosperity and leisure for all. What went wrong?
Newspaper lithograph of people fleeing the yellow fever epidemic on a boat in Mississippi.

The Sick Society

The story of a regional ruling class that struck a devil’s bargain with disease, going beyond negligence to cultivate semi-annual yellow fever epidemics.
Book cover of "The Chinese Question The Gold Rushes and Global Politics"

Who Digs the Mines?

A new book recognizes the global character of Asian exclusion.
Palm Oil Farm from above

The Irreplaceable: Palm Oil Dependency

Cheap palm oil is part of an interlocking late capitalist system.
WPA poster for the City of New York Department of Docks, showing smokestack of ship and cargo being loaded.
Exhibit

International Trade

Histories of how money and commodities have flowed across borders, from the slave-based economies of maritime empires to contemporary globalization.

Sesationalized painting of Native Americans about to scalp a white woman. The Murder of Jane McCrae by John Vanderlyn, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut

“White People,” Victimhood, and the Birth of the United States

White racial victimhood was a primary source of power for settlers who served as shock troops for the nation.
Actress Bobby Bradshaw is tempted by a pearl necklace, 1925.

Pearl Jam

In the twentieth century, the mollusk-produced gem was a must have for members of WASP gentility. In the twenty-first century, its appeal is far more inclusive.
BP is trying to divest its share of the Russian state-owned company Rosneft.
partner

Western Oil Companies Ditching Russia is a New Twist on a Familiar Pattern

For more than a century, Western oil companies have cycled into and out of Russia.
In this photo provided by the U.S. Air Force, a transport plane is framed in a shattered window at the Baghdad airport on June 24, 2003.

How America Learned to Love (Ineffective) Sanctions

Over the past century, the United States came to rely ever more on economic coercion—with questionable results.
Early 20th century black-and-white photograph of workers harvesting kelp.

Burning Kelp for War

World War I saw the availability of potash plummet, while its price doubled. The US found this critical component for multiple industries in Pacific kelp.
Illustration of enslaved workers harvesting sugar cane.

Ethical US Consumers Struggled to Pressure the Sugar Industry to Abandon Slavery

Before the Civil War, US activists sought to combat slavery through sugar boycotts. Instead, consumption grew.
Illustration of burning cannabis with helicopters overhead

The Cold War Killed Cannabis As We Knew It. Can It Rise Again?

Somewhere in Jamaica survive the original cannabis strains that were not burned by American agents or bred to be more profitable.
A pumpkin salt gourd

Salt and Deep History in the Ohio Country

Early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years.
Frederick Douglass and the Haiti Commission on USS Tennessee in Key West.

Frederick Douglass and American Empire in Haiti

Toward the end of his life, Frederick Douglass served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Haiti.
Photo of Jefferson Davis

The Southern Slaveholders Dreamed of a Slaveholding Empire

Antebellum slaveholders weren't content with an economic and social system based on trafficking in human flesh in the South alone.
Photo of California gold fragment found by John Sutter in 1848

A Pacific Gold Rush

On the roads and seas miners traveled to reach gold in the United States and Australia.
Map of Charleston Harbor, 1822.

Elkison v. Deliesseline: The South Carolina Negro Seaman Act of 1822 in Federal Court

Elkison v. Deliesseline presented a federal court with the question of whether a state could incarcerate and enslave a free subject of a foreign government.
Abstract painting titled 'Constellation' by Helen Gerardia

A New Planet in the System

Early Americans conscripted the universe into their nation-building project.
Four stars with different designs

How America Fractured Into Four Parts

People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
Gold-spangled Polish chickens.

Fancy Fowl

How an evil sea captain and a beloved queen made the world crave KFC.
The plough, the loom and the anvil book drawing

In the Common Interest

How a grassroots movement of farmers laid the foundation for state intervention in the economy, challenging the slaveholding South.
Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill

What We Still Get Wrong About Alexander Hamilton

Far from a partisan for free markets, the Founding Father insisted on the need for economic planning. We need more of that vision today.
A car driving down the road.

The Vanishing American Century?

After World War II, American power on the world stage was defined by internationalism and cooperation.
A map of the origins of illnesses across the world.

The Name Blame Game

A history of inflammatory illness epithets.
A graphic featuring a map of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and slavery imagery.

Cancer Alley

A collage artist explores how Louisiana's ecological and epidemiological disasters are founded in colonialism.
A graphic depicting covid-19 with a plane on top of it.

Emerging Diseases, Re-Emerging Histories

The diseases that prove best suited to global expansion are those that best exploit humans' global networks and behaviors in a given age.
Statue of men in a bread line at the FDR memorial.

Who Remembers the Panic of 1819?

We haven’t built many memorials to panics, recessions, or depressions, but maybe we should.

When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided

The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.
Sketch of colonial fur traders and Indigenous people in a canoe.

The Untold Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company

A look back at the early years of the 350-year-old institution that once claimed a vast portion of the globe.
High risk, high return investments in whaling ships, such as the New Bedford, Massachusetts, provided a model for modern venture capital. Courtesy New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Venture Capital Builds The Modern World

The American method of high-risk, potentially high-reward investments has fueled innovation from New England whaling ventures to Silicon Valley start-ups.
partner

Citibank: Exploiting the Past, Condemning the Future

In 2011, Citigroup published a 300-page 200th anniversary commemoration Celebrating the Past, Defining the Future. Is it a past to celebrate?

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