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Marine, eighteenth century. Smithsonian American Art Museum, bequest of Mabel Johnson Langhorne.

Quality Insurance Purposes

Insuring against the cost of insurance itself in Revolutionary-era America.
by Hannah Farber via Lapham’s Quarterly on January 2, 2022
Major General Smedley Butler addresses nearly 16,000 veteran bonus marchers camped in Washington, D.C., July 20, 1932. Smedley urged them to stay until the bonus has been paid. (AP Photo)

The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn't Taught in Schools

How the authors of the Depression-era “Business Plot” aimed to take power away from FDR and stop his “socialist” New Deal.
by Jonathan M. Katz via Rolling Stone on January 1, 2022
Actors James Stewart as George Bailey, Donna Reed as Mary Hatch, and Frank Faylen as Ernie in the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images)

That Time the FBI Scrutinized “It's a Wonderful Life” for Communist Messaging

The film “deliberately maligned the upper class,” according to a report that didn’t like the portrayal of Mr. Potter as a bad guy.
by John Nichols via The Nation on December 24, 2021
Abstract painting called Mayan Pyramid, by Werner Drewes, 1983. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Coin Standard

On the failed dreams and forgotten ruins of William Hope Harvey.
by Olivia Paschal via Lapham’s Quarterly on December 15, 2021
Men outside the New York Herald building, 1930

What History Tells us About the Dangers of Media Ownership

Is media bias attributable to corporate power or personal psychology? Upton Sinclair and Walter Lippmann disagreed.
by Maia Silber via Psyche on December 15, 2021
Frederick Douglass and the Haiti Commission on USS Tennessee in Key West.

Frederick Douglass and American Empire in Haiti

Toward the end of his life, Frederick Douglass served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Haiti.
by Peter James Hudson via Boston Review on December 9, 2021
Lithograph of the waterfront in Alexandria, Virginia 1836.

The Life and Death of an All-American Slave Ship

How 19th century slave traders used, and reused, the brig named Uncas.
by Joshua D. Rothman, Benjamin Skolnik via Slate on December 4, 2021
Machine in a wooden box with 40 dials: an electromechanical machine used in the 1890 U.S. census.

How the US Census Kick-Started America’s Computing Industry

As the country grew, each census required greater effort than the last. That problem led to the invention of the punched card – and the birth of an industry.
by David Lindsay Roberts via The Conversation on December 1, 2021
A naval cap with Soviet and American flags beneath the Pepsi logo

The Doomed Voyage of Pepsi’s Soviet Navy

A three-decade dream of communist markets ended in the scrapyard.
by Paul Musgrave via Foreign Policy on November 27, 2021
Bottles of WD-40 on a shelf

How WD-40 Became Rust’s Worst Enemy

The history of WD-40, a chemical substance with an unusual origin story and a rust-fighting ability that has become a standby of workbenches the world over.
by David Buck via Tedium on November 26, 2021
William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown, Wildcat Banker

How a story told by a fugitive from slavery became a parable of American banking gone bad.
by Ross Bullen via The Public Domain Review on November 24, 2021
Illustration of circus entertainer in a cage with lions and tigers

Joe Exotic Channels the Spirit of America's 19th-Century Tiger Kings

The flamboyant big-cat aficionados of the Gilded Age weren’t strangers to fierce competition, threats and bizarre drama.
by Madeline Steiner via The Conversation on November 18, 2021
Book cover featuring Joseph Kennedy and his family.

Joseph Kennedy, American Fascist

With Susan Ronald’s meticulous, relentless biography, Joseph P. Kennedy is now firmly established in the annals of twentieth-century fascism.
by Carl Rollyson via The Russell Kirk Center on November 7, 2021
Picture of Joe Manchin

Joe Manchin’s Deep Corporate Ties

An underexamined aspect of Manchin’s pro-business positions in the Senate is his early membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council.
by Dan Kaufman via The New Yorker on October 26, 2021
A witch's hat and crooked stick, with the words "rags to witches"

Has Witch City Lost Its Way?

They’re hip, business-savvy, and know how to cast a spell: How a new generation of witches and warlocks selling $300 wands conquered Salem.
by Kathryn Miles via Boston Magazine on October 22, 2021
1836 lithograph of a slave trader marching enslaved people to be sold.

Partners in Brutality

New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on businesses, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people.
by Nicholas Guyatt via New York Review of Books on October 18, 2021
A bicyclist rides past the rubble of a church.

The Disasters in Afghanistan and Haiti Share the Same Twisted Root

Half a world away, the citizens of two nations suffer at the hands of a familiar malefactor.
by Jonathan M. Katz via The New Republic on August 20, 2021
Political cartoon of the U.S Capitol

The Liberals Who Weakened Trust in Government

How public interest groups inadvertently aided the right’s ascendency.
by Kim Phillips-Fein via The New Republic on August 2, 2021
Postcard of the Davis Islands neighborhood in Tampa, Florida.

How Schemers Built a State

How the development of Southwest Florida became a marketing scheme.
by Mark Massaro via Los Angeles Review of Books on June 21, 2021
cheez-its

A Brief History of the Cheez-It

America's iconic orange cracker turns 100 this year.
by Leo DeLuca via Smithsonian Magazine on May 21, 2021
Eli Lilly and Company. “Principal Office and Laboratories, Indianapolis, U.S.A.” Ink on paper, from the Hand Book of Pharmacy and Therapeutics, 1919. Via Wikimedia Commons.

How To Make An Oligopoly

A seven-point memo proposing control of the global insulin market.
by Brittany McWilliams via Contingent on April 18, 2021
Old Bay Seasoning

The Jewish Roots of Old Bay Seasoning

Oy Bay! Become seasoned on the history of America's beloved spice blend.
by Leah Siesfeld via The Nosher on March 30, 2021
A painting of a slave ship.

New York City and the Persistence of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Even after slave trade was banned, the United States and New York City, in particular, were complicit in allowing it to persist.
by Gerald Horne via The Nation on February 24, 2021
A walk-up customer at the door of a minister's marriage license booth in Elkton, Md. during the 1920-30s.

How Elkton Became the Marriage Capital of the East Coast

The story of one small Maryland town that became the Marriage Capital of the East Coast in the 20th century.
by Melissa August via TIME on February 11, 2021
Artistic collage of black leaders surrounded by images associated with prohibition.

The Forgotten History of Black Prohibitionism

We often think of the temperance movement as driven by white evangelicals set out to discipline Black Americans and immigrants. That history is wrong.
by Mark Lawrence Schrad via Politico Magazine on February 6, 2021

The Library of Possible Futures

Since the release of "Future Shock" 50 years ago, the allure of speculative nonfiction has remained the same: We all want to know what’s coming next.
by Samantha Culp via The Atlantic on February 1, 2021
A family sitting around the television together

A Brief History of Consumer Culture

Over the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.
by Kerryn Higgs via The MIT Press Reader on January 11, 2021
Comic with Donald Trump at the head of a White House conference room.

The End of the Businessman President

Donald Trump’s catastrophic tenure will be the nail in the coffin of the worst idea in politics: that the government can be run like a corporation.
by Kyle Edward Williams via The New Republic on December 9, 2020
Thorstein Veblen

The Gadfly of American Plutocracy

Far from a marginal outsider, a new biography contends, Thorstein Veblen was the most important economic thinker of the Gilded Age.
by Simon Torracinta via Boston Review on November 30, 2020
Abandoned Howard Johnson's restaurant overgrown with vegetation.

Howard Johnson’s, Host of the Bygone Ways

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.
via Sometimes Interesting on October 15, 2020
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