Andrew Carnegie

All of Andrew Carnegie’s arguments were devoted to explaining why inequality ultimately was good: not only for its beneficiaries, but for poor people as well.

A third-generation mill worker pays homage to the controversial industrialist.

Times have changed since the days of Carnegie and Rockefeller, but much in philanthropy has remained the same.

Companies across the South profited off the forced labor of people in prison after the Civil War – a racist system known as convict leasing.

As the HBO series "The Gilded Age" suggests, charity allowed wealthy women to play a visible role in public life. It was also a site of inter-class animosity.

Could the separation of the Revolutionary War have been patched in the late 19th century? Some powerful men tried...

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

William Jennings Bryan stoked a worker revolt against protectionism that led to the first income tax.

Plutocrats, anarchists, and what Henry James grasped about the romance of revolution.

A new theory of the leisure class influencer.

Julius Rosenwald understood that charity is not just about giving, but about fixing the inequalities that make giving necessary.

An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor is long overdue.

A Steel City bibliography of Pittsburgh.

On the Black doctors who received their medical degrees and a new sort of freedom in Europe.

Julian Fellowes' new series dramatizes the late 19th-century clash between New York City's old and new monied elite.

Before the rise of macroeconomics that accompanied World War II, price determination was a central problem of economic thought.

What gets lost when we view the American past as primarily a story about capitalism? 

Pittsburgh as a symbol of America itself.

On May 10, 1900, the Navy steamship Quito sailed from Brooklyn, New York, to deliver 5,000 tons of corn and seeds to the “starving multitudes” of India.

A visual exploration of how a critical piece of social infrastructure came to be.