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The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870's and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information about millions of Americans. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life--yet we know almost nothing about them. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and financial status. This data is used to predict...
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In the 1960's and 70's, a diverse range of storefronts-including head shops, African American bookstores, feminist businesses, and organic grocers-countered corporate power by bringing the work of political movements (the New Left, Black Power, feminism, environmentalism, and more) into the marketplace. Through shared ownership, limited growth, and workplace democracy, these "activist entrepreneurs" offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven...
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The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations, and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning multinationals, its massive factories, and the centripetal power of New York in the world of finance, America has shaped political economy for two centuries and more. But an understanding of "capitalism" is as elusive as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism...
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Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In Banking on Freedom, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores this rich period of black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Banking on Freedom offers an unparalleled account of how black women carved...
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In 1951, a new type of publication appeared on newsstands-the physique magazine produced by and for gay men. For many men growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, these magazines and their images and illustrations of nearly naked men, as well as articles, letters from readers, and advertisements, served as an initiation into gay culture. The publishers behind them were part of a wider world of "physique entrepreneurs": men as well as women who ran photography...
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From the founding of New Amsterdam until today, working people have helped create and re-create the City of New York through their struggles. Starting with artisans and slaves in colonial New York and ranging all the way to twenty-first-century gig-economy workers, this book tells the story of New York's labor history anew.
City of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering...
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White supremacists determined what African Americans could do and where they could go in the Jim Crow South, but they were less successful in deciding where black people could live because different groups of white supremacists did not agree on the question of residential segregation. In Threatening Property, Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant investigates early-twentieth-century campaigns for residential segregation laws in North Carolina to show how the...
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Beginning in the 1950s, a group of academics, businesspeople, and politicians set out on an ambitious project to remake North Carolina's low-wage economy. They pitched the universities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as the kernel of a tech hub, Research Triangle Park, which would lure a new class of highly educated workers. In the process, they created a blueprint for what would become known as the knowledge economy: a future built on intellectual...
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The story of the rise of the segregated suburb often begins during the New Deal and the Second World War, when sweeping federal policies hollowed out cities, pushed rapid suburbanization, and created a white homeowner class intent on defending racial barriers. Paige Glotzer offers a new understanding of the deeper roots of suburban segregation. The mid-twentieth-century policies that favored exclusionary housing were not simply the inevitable result...
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The American government today supports a financial system based on mortgage lending, and it often bails out the financial institutions making these mortgages. The Dead Pledge reveals the surprising origins of American mortgages and American bailouts in policies dating back to the early twentieth century.
Judge Glock shows that the federal government began subsidizing mortgages in order to help lagging sectors of the economy, such as farming and construction....
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The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism-since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and...
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The everyday lives of enslaved people were, filled with the backbreaking tasks that their enslavers forced them to complete. But, in spare moments, they found time in which to earn money and obtain goods for themselves. Enslaved people led vibrant economic lives, cultivating produce and raising livestock to trade and sell. They exchanged goods with non-slaveholding whites and even sold products to their enslavers. Did these pursuits represent a modicum...
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From the 1960s through the 1990s, the most common job for women in the United States was clerical work. Even as college-educated women obtained greater opportunities for career advancement, occupational segregation by gender remained entrenched. How did feminism in corporate America come to represent the individual success of the executive woman and not the collective success of the secretary?
Allison Elias argues that feminist goals of advancing...
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In the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States saw both a series of Protestant religious revivals and the dramatic expansion of the marketplace. Although today conservative Protestantism is associated with laissez-faire capitalism, many of the nineteenth-century believers who experienced these transformations offered different, competing visions of the link between commerce and Christianity. Joseph P. Slaughter offers a new account...