Money

Inflation isn't inexorably a bad thing. In fact, it used to be considered good.

How a grassroots movement of farmers laid the foundation for state intervention in the economy, challenging the slaveholding South.

Consumer activists taking on the companies that support former President Donald Trump can learn from the boycott that never ended.

Booker T. Whatley introduced the concept in the 1960s for struggling Black farmers, but his agricultural contributions have been excluded from the narrative.

The Biden administration’s proposed “child allowances” draw on the feminist thought of Crystal Eastman, who advocated “motherhood endowments” 100 years ago.

Dispelling myths of entrepreneurial exceptionalism, a sweeping new history of U.S. capitalism finds that economic gains have always been driven by the state.

The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of 20th-century nation states and financial systems.

Popular politics and reconstructing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

When factories created a population of tired workers, a new frontier in fatigue studies was born.

The 1918 flu pandemic helped to usher in the Hollywood studio system. Could Covid-19 transform the industry?

The domestic slave trade was no sideshow in our history, and slave traders were not bit players on the stage.

Conservatives have weaponized Americans’ desire to help to attack the social safety net.

A seven-point memo proposing control of the global insulin market.

Robert Mundell’s theories spawned decades of economic debate and still matter to the big ideas of today.

How the myth of the overburdened white taxpayer was made.

This plight dates back to the era of slavery.

Heavy industry once drove Pittsburgh’s economy. Now health care does—but without the same hard-won benefits.

A welfare state doesn't distort the market; it just makes government aid fairer.

The history of the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution is a story of sustained efforts to suppress it even as demand for slaves increased.

What's the matter with left-populism? A review of Thomas Frank's "The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism."

Musicians are in peril, at the mercy of giant monopolies that profit off their work.

On deindustrialization, the care economy, and the living legacies of the industrial workers’ movement.

Before beanie babies and Pogs, small rectangles of cardboard were the errant investments of a stratifying American society.

Redlining itself cannot explain this persistence of inequality in America's cities.

Technology can break down, but just as often with government tech, glitches are rooted in policy failures.

History shows that boosting the minimum wage leads to consumer spending.

1915 marked the beginning of the largest domestic migration in American history. Hundreds of thousands of Black Americans began relocating north.

Who needs a public health system when sickness is a personal failure?

Fannie Lou Hamer is among the sharecroppers interviewed in this unauthorized documentary about the plantation of Dixiecrat James Eastland.

When Alfred Winslow Jones created the hedge fund in 1949, the key to its approach was short sales, a practice the GameStop mess returned to public infamy.