Money

A movement to secure payments for descendants of enslaved people rages on.

Spotless bathrooms used to be a crucial selling point for gas stations.

Harvard made headlines by announcing that it would devote $100 million to remedying “the harms of the university’s ties to slavery.”

Consumer debt shapes American lives so thoroughly that it seems eternal and immortal, but it’s actually relatively new to the financial world.

Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan on the data illusion of the rags-to-riches stories.

The history of control and decontrol in the oil market.

Communists fighting the color line. Baseball players resisting owners. Baseball's untold history of struggles against racial injustice and labor exploitation.

The long, strange saga of government cheese.

What degree of legitimacy by voters does a public institution need in a democracy, and how much independence do experts in such an institution need to do their job?

On inflation, institutions, and the governance of the price level.

History’s lessons for the volatile digital currency markets.

Children from poor families or with special formula needs are most at risk.

On school funding and America’s kleptocratic public school divide.

The reasons have to do with the complexity of the transaction, but also with the industry’s explosive growth in its early years.

There was once a thriving Black middle class based on farm ownership. But during the twentieth century, the USDA helped erase that source of wealth.

The diminished status of the non-white working class is not a matter of accident, but of design.

Alternative currencies flourish in desperate times and situations.

The enduring legacy and capacious vision of "Black Reconstruction."

Jim Ruland’s book on the legendary punk label helps explain why we lack a meaningful counterculture today.

Historian Daina Ramey Berry's April 2022 congressional testimony on the role of banks and insurers in US slavery.

Thanks to the efforts of wealthy taxpayers, the "big reveal" of the 1920s was extremely short-lived.

Since its inception, the IPCC itself has been the target of corporate obstructionism.

Automation didn’t start in the age of robots and microchips, but can be traced back to the late 19th century glass industry and its skilled glass workers.

For 30 years, the debate has largely ignored the soaring costs of inaction.

The US Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property.

To what degree can we blame automation for deindustrialization and class decomposition?

We don’t need to overanalyze it. It came down to genuine solidarity that the Amazon Labor Union organizing committee built among themselves and their co-workers.

A conversation about "Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World."

Dueling was a dangerous, ritualized response to a real (or perceived) slight. It may also have been a means of proving one's social and economic capital.

MLB owners’ recent lockout was an effort to reverse the gains that players had won over decades of labor struggle. The owners failed.