Money

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?

The most visible symbol of a labor movement that isn't dead yet, that is willing to fight, not just make backroom deals.

How a struggling entrepreneur in Ohio saved his burger business during Lent and changed the McDonald's menu for good.

Why we pay.

The story of the man who introduced ice cubes into our beverages.

The true economic legacy of the Reagan years is not tax cuts but union busting.

Health care spending grew more slowly in the past two years than it has in over five decades.

Years after ALEC's Truth In Sentencing bills became law, its Prison Industries Act has quietly expanded prison labor nationwide.

Why did the U.S. allow its national communications markets to be run by expansive monopolists?

American legislators have been trying – and failing – to achieve universal health coverage for more than a century now.

What replaced imprisonment for debt was something that has become a mainstay of American life: bankruptcy.

The road to right-wing deregulation began on our nation's highways.

On the utopian origins of Dilbert's workspace.

They’re horrid and useless. Why do pennies persist?

The troubling embrace of the founder of American finance.

Viewed purely in terms of statistics, the recycling of the Gilded Age moniker makes sense, but comparison masks what’s unique about today’s inequality crisis.

America’s ambivalence about labor is nothing new. In the colonial era the ruling class had nothing but contempt for anything that could be justly called "work."

Oscar Hartzell convinced thousands of Americans that they could get a piece of the Sir Francis Drake estate—a multibillion-dollar inheritance that didn’t exist.

On the of role white supremacist ideas in enforcing slavery in the U.S. in the 19th century.