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How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?

Two new books reveal the story of Stanford University’s early years to be rife with corruption, autocracy, incompetence, white supremacy, and murder.

To understand the proslavery defense of the 1850s, one must reckon with the proslavery Malthusianism articulated by Cooper in the 1820s.

The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.

The Robinson-Patman Act was supposed to prevent price discrimination — but consumers wanted cheap goods.

Far from spelling the end of anti-market politics, basic income proposals are one place where it can and has flourished.

The deep roots of the latest WGA strike.

Meet the self-help author who wanted to teach corporate America how to think.

Often forgotten today, the black populists and their acts of cross-racial solidarity terrified the planter class, who responded with violence and Jim Crow laws.

Popular accounts often trace the origins of forced penal labor to the post-Civil War South. But a vast system of forced penal labor existed in the antebellum North.

A new history examines the lost promise and fierce persecution of the IWW.

What is the Federal Reserve, and who put it in charge? Is there no other way to fight inflation? Just what the hell is going on here?

Stretching back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, writers and many others in the industry have fought for their rights as workers.

A companion to a new PBS film, "The Memorial Day Massacre," the first oral history exploring the murder of 10 workers in Chicago.

In 1967, Milton Friedman launched a counterrevolution in economics that overturned the Keynesian theory of inflation.

The Washington state law provides low-interest loans for down payments for those harmed by racially restrictive covenants.

US corporations, with universities as one of their stages, masqueraded as agents of Black solidarity while undermining the demands of African liberation movements.

More than fifty years after the Fair Housing Act, inequality and segregation persists. What went wrong?

A never-before-published tranche of letters reveals the white-collar racism that prevented the world’s most popular athlete from selling Fords.

Why were in-flight meals so much better in the past?

The first South Asians in British North America.

Black jockeys dominated 19th-century American horse racing, but racism chased them away and undoing that damage has been slow going.

How Lincoln's administration financed the Civil War and transformed the nation's decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the postwar centuries.

Regulators with no democratic accountability keep bailing out banks and big depositors — at the cost of billions to taxpayers.

A visual journalist remembers a time when "housing was more flexible, fluid and communal than it is today.”

Activists established politically informed shops to offer alternatives to the consumer culture of chain stores, mass production, and multinational corporations.

Labor activists can learn from the decades-long campaign to undermine their influence by focusing on state-level action to bolster their cause.

Ever since the execution of labor radicals in 1886, reactionaries have tried to tarnish their legacy — and leftists have honored them as working-class martyrs.

In his new book, historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom chronicles the collapse of public transportation in US cities — and explains who really deserves the blame.

First, the GOP became the party of tax cuts and now it won't touch entitlements — which makes a balanced budget nearly impossible.