Steve Fraser is the author of Wall Street: A Cultural History.
Half a century ago it would have come as no surprise to find demonstrating workers from both the public and the private sectors occupying the state house in Madison, Wisconsin along with students, community organisations and church groups. And it isn’t only in Wisconsin – much the same is happening in Ohio and Indiana and elsewhere. Legislative action in Wisconsin has come to a...
From the 1870s, when members of a secret organisation of Irish coalminers, the Molly Maguires, were executed for allegedly assassinating Pennsylvania mine owners and their henchmen, to the summer’s day in 1920 when an Italian anarchist called Mario Buda ignited his dynamite-laden horse-drawn wagon outside the Morgan bank on Wall Street, killing more than 30 bystanders, America was...
‘Why is there no socialism in the United States?’ the German sociologist Werner Sombart asked himself in 1906 – it was also the title of his most famous book. The question...
Many Americans celebrate national holidays by mobbing megastores at dawn, pushing aside the slow-footed and grabbing the $39 computers, while TV crews film the spectacle and warn the indolent...
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