Thomas Blake Earle is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University at Galveston. This interview is based on his new book, The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 2023). JF:...
Farley Grubb is Professor of Economics at the University of Delaware and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). This interview is based on his new book, The Continental Dollar: How the American Revolution Was Financed by...
E.J. Dionne explains: President Biden might not seem like a revolutionary, but he is presiding over a fundamental change in the nation’s approach to economics. Not only is he proposing a major break from the “trickle-down” policies of Ronald Reagan,...
Richard N. Langlois is Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. This interview is based on his new book, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise (Princeton University Press, 2023). JF: What led you...
Bart Elmore is Professor of Environmental History at The Ohio State University. This interview is based on his new book, Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet (University of North Carolina Press, 2023)....
Sharon Ann Murphy is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Classics at Providence College. This interview is based on her new book, Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (University of Chicago...
Muckraker (in the best sense of the word, e.g. Upton Sinclair) Warren Throckmorton has exposed some anti-Christian tendencies in an economic theorist who is apparently a “saint” at Grove City College. For those who don’t know, Throckmorton teaches psychology at...
I just learned about Christian cultural critic Rodney Clapp‘s recent book Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. (I have never met Clapp, but he was the acquisition editor at Baker Books who offered me a contract for Why...
Peter Swenson is Charlotte Marion Saden Professor of Political Science and Professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. This interview is based on his new book, Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in...
Hannah Farber is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University. This interview is based on her new book, Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2021). JF: What...
Gabriel Loiacono is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. This interview is based on his new book, How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories (Oxford University Press, 2021). JF: What led you to write How...
Jonathan Barth is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University. This interview is based on his new book, The Currency of Empire: Money and Power in Seventeenth-Century English America (Cornell University Press, 2021). JF: What led you to write The...
Brian Luskey is Associate Professor of History at West Virginia University. This interview is based on his new book, Men is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020). JF: What led...
Karen E. Spierling is an associate professor of history and director of global commerce at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. She believes that the humanities must “go on the offensive.” Here is a taste of her piece at The Chronicle...
Over at The Washington Post, Heather Long calls our attention to Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller’s new book Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events. Here is a taste of her piece: As humanities majors slump to the...
In 2018, American billionaires paid a lower tax rate than than the working class. This is the first time in this has ever happened. Here is Chris Ingraham’s piece at The Washington Post: A new book-length study on the tax burden...
Peter Guardino is Professor of History at Indiana University–Bloomington. This interview is based on his new book, The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War (Harvard University Press, 2017). JF: What led you to write The Dead March? PG: I wrote The Dead...
In about twenty minutes James Comey will be speaking before the Senate Intelligence Committee. I guess this whole “Infrastructure Week” thing did not work out very well for the Trump administration. Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson moves the conversation beyond infrastructure...
This is the argument made by journalist A.Q. Smith at the website of Current Affairs: A Magazine of Politics and Culture. Here is a taste of his essay “It’s Basically Just Immoral to be Rich.” Of course, when you start...
Over at The Conversation, Yale University economist Robert Shiller and Georgetown University economist George Akerlof argue that free market capitalism preys on human weakness and exploits it for economic gain. According to Shiller and Akerloff, the authors of a new...
