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All the highways of global capitalism found their way into the trackless vastness of rural America. Farmers there were not in dire straits because of their backwoods isolation. On the contrary, it was because they turned out to be living at ground zero of the capitalist economy, where the explosive…

In the 1820s and 1830s, as artisans, journeymen, sailors, longshoremen, and other workers organized the early trade-union movement as well as workers’ political parties, one principal demand was the abolition of imprisonment for debt. Inheritors of a radical political culture, their complaints echo…

The New Deal, or the Keynesian social welfare and administrative state, was something new under the American capitalist sun. It civilized the laissez-faire regime by regulating finance and industry, by recognizing certain collective rights of the organized working class, by establishing a minimum l…

Freedom anchored in acts of self-reliance and the mastery of the market, of nature, of the libido, of other people can be intoxicating, functioning like an aphrodisiac. Even if its social reach recedes as capital accumulation becomes the exclusive terrain of only the mightiest conquistadors, the dr…

Stories about what we now call “the homeland,” its origins and unfolding, do not, conventionally, feature capitalism. Other tales about the country’s history usually take priority. Favorites include, perhaps first and foremost, the New World as the incubator of liberty and democracy in the Western …