Money

Compared to 19th-century arrivals, today's new arrivals are much more likely to be at the extreme ends of the earnings spectrum.

A unique set of composite photographs by Lewis Hine depicting Southern cotton mill workers.

In the late 19th century, Black bartenders gained esteem in the North and South. But their experiences were very different — in ways that may defy assumptions.

American Indians and the tumult in their cultures precipitated by the arrival of alcohol.

An interactive map of U.S. canals in the first half of the 19th century.

Imported from Europe, the custom of leaving gratuities began spreading in the U.S. post-Civil War. It was loathed as a master-serf custom.

Government-run childcare was crucial in enabling women’s employment during World War II, but today the program has largely been forgotten.

Long in retreat in the US, the welfare state found a haven in an unlikely place – the military, where it thrived for decades.

The tendency to divorce racial disparities from economic inequality has a long liberal lineage.

Puerto Rico's financial situation could make it the "next Greece."

On the 1870s skirmish between John D. Rockefeller and the upstart competitors who built the country’s first long-distance oil pipeline.

How automation changed retail banking.

Four changes are especially important when we try to measure changes in the poverty rate since 1964.

Women in the workplace, from 19th century domestic workers to the Rosies of World War II to the labs of Silicon Valley.

Syracuse University Geography professor Matt Huber discusses the 1930s oil boom in the American southwest, and the military might brought in to control it.

No longer home to the open-road outlaws and concrete cowboys of the ’70s, becoming a trucker is now the equivalent of operating a sweatshop on wheels thanks to deregulation.

The story of America’s most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth.

How statistical data came to rule public policy.

Remembering the radical past of a day now devoted to picnics and back-to-school sales.

An explanation of the Manhattan Company, a bank disguised as a municipal water corporation that helped to transform Early Republican politics.

Brad Ricca dives into the history of the Cleveland Indians' name and the creation of "Chief Wahoo."

The postmodern state is under siege from plutocrats and criminals who unknowingly compound each other’s insidiousness.

Conservatives dream of returning to a world where private charity fulfilled all public needs. But that world never existed, and we're better for it.

What the modern world owes slavery. (It’s more than back wages).

The Mexican origins of the birth control pill, and the trade dispute with the U.S. it generated.

Slaveholding plantations of the 19th century used scientific management techniques—and some applied them more extensively than factories.

Unwinding the mortgage giants won't cure Americans of their desire to own a home, whether they can afford it or not.

Understanding how inflation came to be a mainstay in modern economics.

There was a time when Americans valued 'competency' over riches and saw wealth as the cause of poverty.

From the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Tea Party Movement, how have – and haven't – American attitudes about taxes changed over time?