Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

Jessica Levy and Dylan Gottlieb
  • 4.9 (109)
  • HISTORY
  • UPDATED BIMONTHLY
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast is a monthly program devoted to bringing you quality, engaging stories that explain how capitalism has changed over time. We interview historians and social and cultural critics about capitalism’s past, highlighting the political and economic changes that have created the present. Each episode gives voice to the people who have shaped capitalism – by making the rules or by breaking them, by creating economic structures or by resisting them.

  1. Justene Hill Edwards on the Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank

    MAR 5

    Justene Hill Edwards on the Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank

    In this month's episode Justene Hill Edwards leads listeners on a deep dive into the rise and fall of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, also known as the Freedman's Bank. Among the topics explored are the bank's relationship to the similarly named Freedman's Bureau, the ways the bank’s administrators worked to gain African Americans’ trust, and, notably, how these same administrators betrayed African Americans’ trust by squandering, and, at times, outright stealing their savings to fuel their own risky ventures with longterm consequences for the racial wealth gap and African Americans’ relationship with American capitalism.

    42 min
  2. Erik Baker on the Entrepreneurial Century

    FEB 3

    Erik Baker on the Entrepreneurial Century

    Back in high school, my social studies teacher—who was, of course, also the football coach—told my class that entrepreneurs were the heroes of American history. If we enjoyed a dynamic economy and good jobs, it was all thanks to their genius for innovation and risk-taking. And if we wanted to get ahead, he said, we’d need to foster the same sort of entrepreneurial spirit in ourselves. You are probably rolling your eyes right now. I certainly remember doing the same back in 10th grade. But Erik Baker’s new book, Make Your Own Job How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, revealed that my teacher was far from outlier: he was part of a century-long current of entrepreneurial boosterism. From Henry Ford to Marcus Garvey, Peter Drucker to Sam Walton, the War on Poverty to the shareholder value revolution, Baker shows how the entrepreneurial work ethic captivated thinkers in every corner of American life. And he reveals how for workers, it promised a way to transcend precarity and—just maybe—become the protagonist of one’s own economic life.

    39 min
  3. Mary Bridges on Bankers and the Dawn of American Empire

    JAN 2

    Mary Bridges on Bankers and the Dawn of American Empire

    Looking back from our contemporary vantage point, the United States’ global capitalist empire looks both omnipresent and inevitable. Much of the world’s trade is denominated in dollars. American financial institutions are at the helm of international investment and capital transfers. And US military might enforces this order, either implicitly—or sometimes quite explicitly. But as Mary Bridges argues, America’s financial dominance was neither pre-ordained nor monolithic, particularly in its early days at the start of the twentieth century. In her new book, Bridges’ follows the foot soldiers on the imperial frontier: everyday bankers, working at overseas branch banks in places like Manilla and Hong Kong. It was these bankers who did the daily work of building out American global finance. And they brought with them their classed, racialized, and gendered worldviews, embedding those structures of inequality in the very foundations of dollar-dominated globalization.

    36 min
  4. Seth Rockman on Slavery's Material History

    12/02/2024

    Seth Rockman on Slavery's Material History

    A simple leather shoe. A scratchy shirt made of cotton or wool. A roughly-hewn axe. A leather whip, braided in New Jersey. Southern slavery did not just depend on an extractive economic system, or a highly-unequal racial and social order, or a brutal regime of labor exploitation—even though it needed all of those things. It also required a vast array of goods: real, tangible tools and garments that were usually made in the North and used in the South. Seth Rockman’s new book follows those everyday objects: from their production, to their sale, to their distribution and use on plantations. Along the way, he reveals the economic and imaginative ties that linked people living across antebellum America—North and South. And he explains how those plantation goods could become sites of struggle, as slaves used them to contest the terms of their bondage.

    52 min
  5. Andrew Kahrl on Inequality, Theft, and Taxation in Modern America

    11/05/2024

    Andrew Kahrl on Inequality, Theft, and Taxation in Modern America

    Taxes. Is there anything Americans like to complain about more? This episode takes a deep dive into the U.S. tax system, paying particular attention to the property tax. Exploding a popular myth that purports Black Americans pay little to no taxes, historian Andrew Kahrl reveals how Black Americans have long paid more than their fair share of property taxes amid and after the rise of the Jim Crow fiscal order. Along the way, we also discuss the role property taxes play in local government, movements for equitable taxation, and the exploitative tax lien industry and its role in a massive government-sanctioned theft of Black land.

    51 min
  6. Andrew McKevitt on Gun Capitalism

    10/01/2024

    Andrew McKevitt on Gun Capitalism

    450 million. According to our best estimates, that’s how many guns there are in the United States. To put that in perspective: if you gave a firearm to every single person in the nation—including babies and young children—you’d still have at least 100 million guns left over. Why did we amass such a large stockpile of guns? How did the US become an outlier among nations when it came to civilian gun ownership? On this month’s episode, Andrew McKevitt reveals the history of what he calls “gun capitalism” in the decades after World War II. He helps us see how the exploding firearms market was related to broader currents: from the rise of mass consumerism, to Cold War anti-communism, to grassroots social movements for consumer regulation. Is there any way to stem the seemingly limitless accumulation of guns in the United States? Take a listen and find out.

    49 min
  7. Rachel Gross on How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America

    09/02/2024

    Rachel Gross on How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America

    In 2022 and 2023, an estimated 50 million Americans went camping. Many others participated in outdoor recreation activities ranging from mountain-climbing to sailing. According to the U.S. Department of Congress, in 2022, the outdoor recreation economy was worth $563.7 billion or 2.2 percent of GDP. In this episode, historian Rachel Gross takes us on an adventure through the outdoor industry’s rise, from Teddy Roosevelt's famous buckskin jacket to the ascendance of companies like Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean, to the use of synthetic materials like GoreTex, and much much more. Along the way, we discuss an important question: Why is it that so many people’s first stop on the way to the woods is an outdoor store?

    42 min
  8. Margot Canaday on Queer Workers in Modern America

    08/01/2024

    Margot Canaday on Queer Workers in Modern America

    In today's episode, Margot Canaday reveals the not-so-hidden history of LGBT workers in modern America. In the absence of state protections, she finds, some employers actually appreciated queer workers precisely because they were contingent, unattached, and exploitable. In many ways, that employment relationship augured the way all workers would come to be treated in the era of post-Fordism. And it would set the terms for queer peoples’ struggles for recognition and protections on the job in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

    51 min
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    Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast is a monthly program devoted to bringing you quality, engaging stories that explain how capitalism has changed over time. We interview historians and social and cultural critics about capitalism’s past, highlighting the political and economic changes that have created the present. Each episode gives voice to the people who have shaped capitalism – by making the rules or by breaking them, by creating economic structures or by resisting them.

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