Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is a sweeping and insightful history of the local property tax in the United States from Reconstruction onward that speaks eloquently to urban history, tax history, and histories of capitalism and race in the United States. Kahrl exposes the relentless process of dispossession and exploitation, captive taxpayers and fiscal apartheid within the local property tax that has overtaxed Black Americans by over $275 billion, cost $326 billion in land loss, and created a generational wealth difference compounded into trillions. But Kahrl is not focused only on individual loss or even community dispossession, but on entrenched systems of legalized theft built into the local property tax that have reinforced themselves over time through the most localized bureaucratic subjectivity and bias, such that poor cities are now left with few fiscally sustaining options other than preying on their poorest citizens.

Whether by reevaluating previously underappreciated factors or by uncovering new source material, historical scholarship occasionally makes immediate and simultaneous interventions in both academic and public-facing conversations.1 Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is one such work, and actually accomplishes these two tasks admirably. In the last two decades, scholars have investigated African American ownership of real property in land and homes, as well as the ways that governmental and private actors, policies, and practices have impaired Black people's ability to acquire and accumulate wealth in this country.2 This body of scholarship, alongside the work of public intellectuals, has served to jumpstart discussion around the issue of reparations.3 Prior to the release of Kahrl's illustrious book, however, no one had identified property taxes as lying at the very center of race-based structural inequality.4

First, I want to thank Modern American History co-editors Sarah Snyder and Darren Dochuk for selecting my book for this roundtable and assembling such an incredible group of scholars to read and comment on it. I drew heavily on these readers’ previous works when writing The Black Tax and held up their books as models of the kind of engaging and impactful historical scholarship that I aspired to achieve. Which makes their positive reactions to my book all the more gratifying, even as it makes my job here a bit harder. I have no complaints to respond to, no arguments to defend, no decisions or only a few omissions to justify or explain.

Amid the inflation crisis of the 1970s, the Austrian School economist F. A. Hayek presented a radical proposal to solve inflation: the denationalization of currency and the introduction of competing currencies into the monetary system. While Hayek's proposal proved too radical for mainstream economists, Hayek found support within the American libertarian movement. Libertarians realized that Hayek's radical proposal would limit state control over the monetary system and allow for the free exchange of gold. Even though libertarians were not immediately successful in bringing Hayek's plan to fruition, their continued activism paved the way for the creation of cryptocurrency in 2009. This article demonstrates how Hayek and his libertarian supporters opened a new chapter in the history of the “money question” in the United States by advocating for the elimination of the government monopoly over money and the abolition of monetary politics itself.

#BankBlack. #BuyBlack. In the wake of deadly police murders of unarmed Black women and men, calls for greater investment in Black business emerged as one panacea for the myriad divisions rending the very flesh of the American promise. In July 2016, hip-hop artist and business owner Michael “Killer Mike” Render issued a call to action days after the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “We owe them our outrage,” he stressed in a call-in to a town hall meeting sponsored by cable television channels MTV and BET and hosted by a popular local Atlanta radio station. “But,” he countered, “we don't have to burn our city down.” Instead of burning, he challenged 1 million people to open a 100-dollar account at a Black bank. Days following Killer Mike's call to “bank Black,” about 8,000 Atlanteans opened accounts in Citizens Trust Bank, a Black-owned bank started in 1921. Riding a catchy hashtag and waves of discontent, the #BankBlack movement quickly spread beyond Atlanta. In less than a year, people around the world moved an estimated $60 million into Black-owned banks.

Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley was one of many progressive Democrats denouncing student debt as a “multigenerational, multiracial injustice” in the new millennium. She joined researchers, activists, and frustrated borrowers in pointing out that federal student loan programs disproportionately left people of color, especially women, drowning in college debt.

Understanding the history of consumer debt in the twentieth century seems simple enough: market making. Debt has existed as long as civilization, but it was only in the last century that our petty debts became big business, and that was made possible by making markets for consumer debts akin to those of businesses and governments.

In the first half of the twentieth century, debt played an unexpectedly large role in shaping public views of American foreign relations. Debt—specifically, the public debt of other sovereign states—seems far removed from the everyday experience of Americans seeking credit from butchers and grocers or, in the global arena, decidedly dull in contrast to headlines about wars and assassinations. Yet if articles in thousands of local newspapers are an indicator, before World War I millions of Americans had been exposed to detailed coverage of the problematic indebtedness of the nearer nations of Latin America. To engaged readers in every corner of the United States, the financial entanglements of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Honduras must have been a familiar trope—a sign of weakness if not immorality—and, as the policy of Dollar Diplomacy emerged after 1904, a harbinger of U.S. intervention.

It is truly a pleasure and an honor to have my work read by five such esteemed colleagues, and I want to begin by thanking all of them for the thoughtfulness and care of their essays, and also to express my gratitude to Darren Dochuk for organizing this exchange. After working in (pandemic-exacerbated) isolation for so long, it is fascinating for me to see the book through others’ eyes, to appreciate what has resonated, and to grapple with questions and qualms as well.

In the early 1920s, legal and economic experts in the U.S. Treasury Department played a pivotal role in developing U.S. fiscal policy. Thomas S. Adams was one such expert and a key architect of the World War I fiscal state. After the war, Adams envisioned an innovative business tax that could have been the first broad-based, national consumption tax in the United States but was rejected by populist lawmakers. Later, Adams would be identified as one of the intellectual pioneers of the modern value-added tax (VAT)—a tax that has been adopted in nearly every developed country in the world except the United States and has also come to underwrite expansive, progressive social-welfare spending. How did a tax that began with an American expert fail to take hold in the United States? Democratic forces in the shape of organized political and economic interests both facilitated and frustrated the development of seemingly rational tax laws and spending policies crafted by fiscal experts. While Adams learned firsthand how these democratic forces influenced the relationship between expertise and state capacity, this missed opportunity to enact a comprehensive national consumption tax also influenced the peculiar development of the modern American fiscal and social-welfare states.

Beef creates an emotional resonance that far outstrips its place within the market. In the 2000s, chicken may have dethroned beef as the most common meat on American plates, ending its reign since the 1940s, but most people do not seem to associate chicken breasts or poultry farmers with national identity the way Americans see ribeyes and cowboys as symbols of the nation's muscular, frontier past.

In the mid-1950s, the Eisenhower administration and Congress erupted in a sharp partisan debate over how to pay for the novel National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, slated to become the most expensive and expansive public works project in United States history. Republicans advocated for interest-bearing bonded debt borrowed from banks, while Democrats preferred to avoid debt service costs and apply a direct tax-and-pave approach to the enormous state building project. The chosen fiduciary practices promised to be as permanent as the physical infrastructure they paid to construct and maintain. Consequently, the fraught episode saw the two parties contest not only transportation infrastructure and the capital supply upon which it depended, but indeed the very nature and future of American political economy. When the tax-and-pave approach prevailed, it saved taxpayers interest costs, but came with its own perilous consequences as it set near-limitless development in motion.

In 1967, Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kotex, hired women's marketing consultant Estelle Ellis to create and run the corporation's new sex education program. The Life Cycle Center, which opened in 1968, did not produce advertisements, but rather developed sex education curricula for public school classrooms. Its program, the Life Cycle Library, divided women's lives into distinct stages, tethering Kimberly-Clark goods and services to specific junctures of an idealized, heterosexual life. Ellis transformed the “life cycle” into a profitable, enduring marketing concept for Kimberly-Clark. She also extended the Center's influence, rendering it a research and educational authority on women's reproductive health for teachers, social scientists, government actors, and readers. Ellis's career reveals how marketers infiltrated powerful sites of institutional and public health discourse, reshaping them to fit commercial aims and intentions.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Sentinels of the Republic, a conservative citizens' organization, mounted a fierce campaign against the adoption of the federal Child Labor Amendment. The Sentinels were able to defeat the amendment by painting it as a threat to the sovereignty of the male-headed family. This appeal proved an effective rallying cry across sex, class, and faith lines, and galvanized significant opposition to the expansion of state power. Initially formed in 1922, the Sentinels, composed predominantly of elite businessmen, lawyers, and antifeminists, remained an active antistatist lobby throughout the following two decades, and formed a key part of the pro-business lobby that attacked the New Deal. Assessing the gendered political ideology and organizing strategies of the Sentinels reveals how patriarchal ideas about the traditional family played a core and constitutive role in the development of conservative free-market politics.

History is a word for a certain kind of reasoning: reasoning about time, about human agency, and about material records that can provide information about humans as marked by time. For many scholars—not to mention many of those outside the academy—such reasoning is antithetical to the word religion. No matter how many books prove incontrovertibly that the authors of the Talmud engaged rigorously with Greek philosophy, or that Islamic philosophers contributed to the formation of modern scientific practice, or that evangelical readers engaged significantly with Biblical criticism, scholars of religion have not (and perhaps finally cannot) upend the common perception that religion is not a site of reasoned thought, but rather a space where reason is suspended. “Religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it. Finally, historians are coming to grips with this simple truth,” David A. Hollinger opined in response to reports about the flurry of scholarly interest in religion as an effect in the modern United States. It is a good quip, but one that portrays the historian as an axiomatically rationalist hero, swooping into medieval confusion in order to give clarifying accounts of the truth behind puzzling theologies, curious myths, and archaic rituals. Hollinger suggests that religious people or religious historians cannot do this work. Believers by his lights are not to be trusted with the reasoning history demands.

Reports of the rise of the United States to a lead role on the global stage in the early twentieth century have been greatly exaggerated. As many Americans at the time recognized, the United States continued to have less capacity for overseas power projection and remained far more dependent on the world's reigning hegemon, Great Britain, than is generally now realized. The United States, it is true, acquired an overseas empire in 1898. But it lacked the basic attributes of a great power, such as economic sovereignty, naval power, and domestic consensus on the desirability of global great-power status. Even after World War I, which was a better candidate than the Spanish-American War as the moment when the United States became a leading global power, both the material and the cultural basis of that power remained fragile.

A new generation of liberals emerged in the 1970s, a decade of stagflation, deindustrialization, global capital flight, and public sector fiscal crises. Prevailing interpretations of New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis explain their emphasis on entrepreneurialism and post-industrial sectors as the byproduct of cynical electoral strategies of “triangulation,” that is, primarily as a reaction to the rise of Reagan Republicanism. This article instead positions their political economy as part of a much longer history of liberals’ efforts to restructure the economy in order to stimulate new jobs and tax revenues that might also generate public revenue and support a progressive policy agenda. With roots in local, state, and regional industrial policies inspired by the New Deal, “supply-side liberalism” reemerged with force in the 1970s and 1980s, revealing heretofore unappreciated continuities that contextualize and clarify the origins of New Democrats’ promotion of a set of seemingly “neoliberal” economic policies.