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Fashionable minimalism replaced plush opulence. That’s a recipe for commotion.

Today, despite their mixed record, private prison companies are overseeing the vast majority of undocumented migrants.

The great financial catastrophe of our times is still badly misunderstood, despite its grotesque consequences.

The industry's price-gouging economic model was engineered by Wall Street and its political enablers—and only Washington can fix it.

The era of audience exploitation began in earnest thanks in large part to the experiments of Dr. Frank Stanton in the 1930s.

No coconut, chocolate, or mint in sight.

America’s long history of predatory lending.

“I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” Twain said. “It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.”

An oral history of the biggest one-day stock market drop in history.

Twitter, valuing expansion over principles, achieved its goal of changing the world. But not in the way that it planned.

It’s more helpful to think about exploitation and disrespect than to define cultural “ownership.”

Decades of tough-on-crime policies that criminalized the poor and people of color are yet to be undone, but the pendulum is beginning to swing.

Decades after Dr. Jonas Salk opposed patenting the polio vaccine, the pharmaceutical industry has changed.

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

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.

A conversation with some of the hottest filmmakers on the scene: They're young, they're Black, but they're making green.

The location of Trump's immigrant detention center has a painful history of incarceration, abuse, and private interests.

How did the concept become the solution to society’s most deeply entrenched problems?

Expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit could make a successful program even better—and address a major crisis.

How Irving Thalberg helped turn M-G-M into the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and scale.

The aviator’s publicity-mad husband, George Palmer Putnam, kept pushing her to risk her life for the sake of fame.

How could two renowned, high-ranking men of the American Revolution have fallen into such dire straits that they feared the loss of all they worked for?

The 1881, Henry George’s ”Progress and Poverty” proposed a land value tax — helping to usher in the Progressive Era.

Letters, diaries, and remembrances shared on JSTOR by University of the Pacific reveal the hardships of day-to-day life during the California Gold Rush.

Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures.

How the American legal system created an economic environment that subordinated the entire world to domestic business interests.

America’s early leaders were worried not only about demagogues like Donald Trump, but about the rise of an antidemocratic, wealthy elite that goads such men on.

In 1929, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) railed against the growing trend of recorded music in movie theaters instead of live musicians.

Hard thinking on difficult and uncomfortable questions about how to keep everything from falling apart.

The connections between the first president’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his evolving attitudes toward his enslaved laborers at Mount Vernon.