Money

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.

The paths the country took out of that earlier crisis offer valuable lessons for what we should do now, and what we should fear.

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.

Until more Americans know what happened in periods such as the Gilded Age, they can’t protect themselves from those who abuse history to advance poor policy.

The Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa—with a little help from the mob—built Las Vegas as we know it today.

Child labor was common in urban, industrial America for most of the country’s history. Now lawmakers are making concerted efforts to repeal statutes that prohibit it.

Part of the utility of the game is how many intersections can be addressed, a Choose Your Own Adventure of lesson planning.

In 1939, inspired by the popularity of iced tea, a cooperative of coffee growers launched a decades-long campaign to convince Americans to drink iced coffee.

Turning the history of capitalism into a morality tale about good guys and bad guys is tempting.

Americans have long demanded — and regularly received — debt relief from legislatures.

We should find inspiration in their goals today.

At the very beginning of the auto industry, no less than three radically different design-for-maintenance philosophies fought it out.

A foundational flaw of the United States.

How Henry Ford managed the formation of the Ford Motor Company.

Gas stations caused a $20 billion toxic mess — and it’s not going away.

The focus of labor history is often—unsurprisingly—workers’ organizations and what has made them thrive or languish. But employers organized, too.

Even throwing off of a colonial power, representative institutions, Protestantism, and local autonomy in school decisions did not produce an egalitarian system.

The history of food inflation during World War I, and the riots that halted it, show how capitalists take advantage of consumer expectations to price gouge.

The U.S. government’s redress program for Japanese Americans showed that the money matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters.