Money

How big business lies behind early efforts to encourage Americans to recycle.

A discussion of the booming 19th-century trade in scrap metal.

The U.S. has long supplied the world with AR-15 rifles. But only when we see its grim effects at home do politicians call for restricting its sale.

Interpreting dreams for fun and profit. The importance of oneiromancy (dream reading) to American betting culture.

Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform was supposed to move needy families off government handouts and onto a path out of poverty. How has it turned out?

The critical role that banking played in the political struggles of early American history.

They were enormous, tech-savvy, and invasive in their methods—and they enlisted Abraham Lincoln into their ranks.

Suburban corporate campuses have isolated themselves by design from the communities their products were supposed to impact.

The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.

How every major industry and marketplace in America came to be controlled by a single, monolithic player.

Land redistribution could have served as the primary means of reparations for former slaves. Instead, it did exactly the opposite.

Victorian diners loved white tile, too.

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.