Money

Efforts to restrict immigration have long coexisted with — and even reinforced — the nation's economic reliance on Mexican laborers.

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.

The film illustrates the near-impossibility of upward mobility during the segregation era.

The omissions in Trump's historical narratives reveal how he views national wealth: only the people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder matter.

Trump is not alone in his support for tariffs. Henry Carey also believed tariffs could help American workers.

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

The 1790s debate shows that, even when they aim at moral goods, tariffs abet cronyism and corruption.

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.

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media.

As Americans file their taxes this tax season, the Trump administration threatens to unravel the modern fiscal state.

How the dystopian visions of the nativist right are in keeping with a long tradition of neoliberal ideology.

How did libertarians come to embrace Henry George, a thinker championed by political coalitions ranging from early zionists to the global Green Party?

An American story.

How today’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ.

How endless options became our only option.

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

William Jennings Bryan stoked a worker revolt against protectionism that led to the first income tax.

How neoliberals fell in love with “human nature”—the glue that still unites the divergent factions of the new right.

Trump claimed that the income tax was passed for “reasons unknown to mankind” and caused the Great Depression. Here’s the real history.

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

As vital to the success of industrial New England as the mill girls who toiled in the factories were the women who oversaw their lodging.

Lessons from Bear Stearns's collapse 17 years ago.

In the 1990s, an entire industry was born of trying to convince Americans that Beanie Babies were a great investment opportunity.

Three new books propose market solutions to problems that require government intervention. We’ve been here before. It didn’t end well.

According to Andrew Kahrl, the property tax has been used to disposs black homeowners since the 19th century.

In 1932, married women were among the first targets in a campaign to reduce federal spending and balance the budget.

The Reagan administration offers a cautionary tale about cost-cutting zeal crashing up against the reality of how government works.

For decades, the NCAA vigorously opposed sports gambling. Now, March Madness is one of the most bet-on sporting events.

On the movement that fought for old-age pensions during the Great Depression.