Kim Phillips-Fein

Indiana workers grapple with a factory closure.

In 1962, Michael Harrington—a former Catholic Worker adherent and follower of Dorothy Day turned socialist activist—published a short book that sought to shatter the complacency of postwar affluence: The Other America. In this brief tour through the lives of the ...

Amid a slew of golden anniversaries this year marking signature achievements of the civil rights movement, it was easy to overlook the fiftieth birthday of a slim document titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The 1965 study, which soon became known as the ...

Margaret Fuller was thirty-three and suffering from migraines when she wrote “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,” a manifesto on behalf of sexual equality, and saw it published in The Dial, the journal founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson whose editorship she ...

An hour before closing time, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange hardly seems like a dignified institution at the epicenter of American finance: It’s more like a sports bar. Throngs of grownup frat-boy traders stare at numbers flashing on a gigantic screen. Moments of calm ...

Every morning at 5:30 a.m. the buses roll into the ghetto. They stop to pick up their cargo of dark-skinned workers, then turn around and drive out to the region just beyond the city limits—the place where anyone can find work. Once in the industrial districts of the ...

What would you do if you won a million dollars? Forget the revolution; this is your ticket to the Kingdom of Freedom. No matter how many hours you log in at a fast-food restaurant or behind a secretary’s desk, it’s unlikely you’ll ever save enough to buy a house or take a ...

Poker is not a rebel’s gamble.