Money

Throughout American history, philanthropy has involved the offering of time, money and moral concern to benefit others, but it carries a complicated legacy.

Perhaps the lesson to take from this year of living online is not about making better technology. It’s about recognizing technology’s limits.

On the Black labor organizers who fought for civil rights after Reconstruction and through the twentieth century.

The panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that triggered a multi-year economic depression.

A conversation about the roots of organized resistance to federal regulation of public lands in the American West.

The hugely influential but largely forgotten labor leader Ben Fletcher couldn’t be more relevant to the most urgent political projects of today.

How banks ripped off Americans, destroyed Black wealth, and got away with it.

It's remembered as one of the best industrial jobs a worker could get in postwar America. Less remembered is how brutal life on the factory floor was – and still is.

A new history of Ed Logue and his vision of urban renewal documents the broken promises of midcentury liberalism.

For more than seven decades American roads were dotted with the familiar orange roof and blue cupola of the ubiquitous Howard Johnson’s restaurants and Motor Lodges.

A new history charts the global legacy of Fordist mass production, tracing its appeal to political formations on both the left and the right.

In certain corners of the internet, you can actually buy money, but these bills are relics of the Free Banking Era that reigned from the 1830s to the 1860s.

Postwar prosperity depended on a truce between capitalist growth and democratic fairness. Is it possible to get it back?

Proposals giving tenants the right to purchase their building are being revived as Covid-19 puts renters at risk.

On Populist programs and democratic central banking.

The “Middle Class Nation” and “American Exceptionalism” found each other late, and under specific circumstances.

Historian James Oakes offers a critique of the New History of Capitalism.

On the origins of "going postal."

Reflecting on "Capitalism and Slavery" (1944), a work that continues to influence scholarship today.

Radicals have long been blamed for wildfires in the Pacific Northwest.

A reduction in public housing units left Americans at the mercy of private landlords.

Even housing policies that sought to create more Black homeowners were stymied by racism and a determination to shrink the government’s presence.

A leading expert on financial crises explains how the pandemic is upending economic orthodoxy and raising the stakes of the 2020 election.

The policy roots of today’s childcare crisis.

Why Americans rejected educating only the children of the wealthy.

Fears of great wealth and the need for economic equality go back to the country’s origins.

In “Radical Hamilton,” Christian Parenti argues that the left should use Alexander Hamilton’s mythologized status to drive home his full agenda.

Republicans are replacing the public good with a far narrower definition of it.

The debate between historians and economists over the definition of capitalism, and the legacy of slavery in the structure of today's economy.

Exploring the economic mobility of 11,172 middle class families over a 50-year period.