Book cover for The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram features a phone cord snaking around text.
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Irrelevant at Best, or Else Complicit

The state of design in 1970.
Political cartoon of General Jackson Slaying the Many Headed Monster (the Second National Bank).

The Ghost of Nicholas Biddle

Trump’s war against elite academia has created an uncanny parallel to the most dramatic fight in Jackson’s day—the attack on the 2nd Bank of the United States.
Cover of book. Red text on a blue background with stickers of Karl Marx's face arranged like the 50 stars.

Marx: The Fourth Boom

Were you to vanish Marx from every library, you’d destroy the central interlocutor around which most of capitalism is built.
John Cassidy

John Cassidy on Capitalism and Its Critics

The author on capitalism’s critics, why everyone is so unhappy with the system, and what may come next.
Illustration of lady liberty balancing housework and child care, holding cash instead of a torch.

The World That ‘Wages for Housework’ Wanted

The 1970s campaign fought to get women paid for their work in the home—and envisioned a society built to better support motherhood.
The insolvent brothers giving queer bail

Insolvent Brothers: The Generals Ethan and Ira Allen

How could two renowned, high-ranking men of the American Revolution have fallen into such dire straits that they feared the loss of all they worked for?
Friedrich Hayek

Hokey Cowboy: Is Hayek to Blame?

Hayek suspected that nothing about the vindication of neoliberalism was likely to be straightforward.
Portrait of Henry George

“The Great Enigma of Our Times”

The 1881, Henry George’s ”Progress and Poverty” proposed a land value tax — helping to usher in the Progressive Era.
Vintage illustration of three generations of a 1950s American family, sitting in their living room watching television (screen print), 1950.

How Social Reactionaries Exploit Economic Nostalgia

Conservatives think we need traditional hierarchies to reverse social decline; But it’s the economic equality created by strong unions that Americans miss.
The U.S. Housing Corporation built nearly 300 homes in Bremerton, Wash., during World War I.

A Time When the US Government Built Homes for Working-Class Americans to Deal With a Housing Crisis

During World War I, the government constructed entire communities for workers and their families, setting new standards for housing and neighborhood planning.
Mexican men in line for work in the Bracero program.
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What the World War II-Era Bracero Program Reveals About U.S. Immigration Debates

Efforts to restrict immigration have long coexisted with — and even reinforced — the nation's economic reliance on Mexican laborers.
A magnifying glass on C. Wright Mills's book "The Power Elite."

Whatever Happened to the Power Elite?

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.
Still frames from the film Sinners spliced with photos depicting a whites-only sign and a group of African American families

The Jim Crow Economy Is the True Horror in 'Sinners'

The film illustrates the near-impossibility of upward mobility during the segregation era.
McKinley poster that reads "Prosperity at home, prestige abroad."

Trump, Historians, and the Lessons of U.S. Tariff History

The omissions in Trump's historical narratives reveal how he views national wealth: only the people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder matter.
Henry Carey
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The 19th Century Thinker Who Touted Tariffs

Trump is not alone in his support for tariffs. Henry Carey also believed tariffs could help American workers.
Garment workers use sewing machines at a textile facility in New York City in 1975.

Tariffs and the Shop Floor

A former garment worker reflects on rank-and-file agitation in the US garment industry just before the industry fled the country.
U.S Custom House.

Lessons from Early America’s Tariff Wars

The 1790s debate shows that, even when they aim at moral goods, tariffs abet cronyism and corruption.
City workers get their lunch at the Horn & Hardart automat in New York City, ca 1940.

Choice and Its Discontents

Today no one on either side of the political spectrum would present themselves as an enemy of choice. Sophia Rosenfeld exposes the complex legacy of this idea.
Diagram of a movement experiment studying abnormalities in walking

The Making of the American Culture of Work

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media.
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Tax Season and the Making of the American Fiscal State

As Americans file their taxes this tax season, the Trump administration threatens to unravel the modern fiscal state.
Chinese migrants wrapped in blankets on a beach, from the cover of "Camp of the Saints."
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Mutant Capitalism

How the dystopian visions of the nativist right are in keeping with a long tradition of neoliberal ideology.
A political cartoon of Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland emptying the U.S. treasury.

Radical Tariffs Aren’t New, But They Have Been Disastrous

An American story.
Elon Musk holds a chain saw as he shakes hands with Argentine president Javier Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The Method in the Far Right’s Madness

How today’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ.
A drawing of human eyes behind a variety of consumer goods, including milk, shoes, and toothpaste.

The Surprising History of the Ideology of Choice

How endless options became our only option.
Political cartoon of men chopping down the tree of slavery.

The Root and The Branch: Working-Class Reform and Antislavery, 1790–1860

On the robust influence of labor reform and antislavery ideas and movements on each other from the early National period to the Civil War.
Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan

American Populists Used to Run Against Tariffs. It Could Happen Again.

William Jennings Bryan stoked a worker revolt against protectionism that led to the first income tax.
Headshots of Charles Murray, Friedrich Hayek, and Elon Musk in front of a red backgrounds.

Free Markets and Fixed Natures

How neoliberals fell in love with “human nature”—the glue that still unites the divergent factions of the new right.
Political cartoon showing a dog named 'income tax' running from a can called "supreme court decisions."

No, President Trump, the Income Tax Wasn’t A Mistake. But It Was an Accident.

Trump claimed that the income tax was passed for “reasons unknown to mankind” and caused the Great Depression. Here’s the real history.
A bread line on New York's Lower East Side in 1930.

Trump Tariffs Conjure Specter of Smoot-Hawley Act, a Depression-Era Blunder

The 1930 tariff bill hurt exporters and provoked other countries to enact their own tariffs as the U.S. economy grappled with the Great Depression.
A worker removes bottles of American-made Jack Daniel's whiskey from a shelf at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) Queen's Quay store in Toronto, Canada.
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The History Behind Canadian Boycotts of American Whiskey

A global marketplace has shaped the U.S. whiskey industry for a century, even as it brands itself distinctly American.