Business & Finance

<p><span class="deck">A CENTURY AGO, you’d eat steak and lobster when you couldn’t afford chicken. Today, it can cost less than the potatoes you serve with steak. What happened in the years between was an extraordinary marriage of technology and the market.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">HISTORY’S MOST PHOTOGENIC LABOR dispute lasted 30 days, spread to eight cities, closed 37 plays, and finally won performers some respect.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">In a nation of inventors, it has always been the single most invented thing. At this very moment, hundreds of Americans are busy obeying Emerson’s famous dictum, even though the machine he exhorted them to build has existed in near-transcendental perfection for almost a century.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">When American cars ruled the world</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The imperium of modern television advertising was born in desperate improvisation.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">…and grow, and grow, from almost no employees to three million. Don’t blame the welfare state, or the military; the truth is much more interesting.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The video game turns 25 this year, and it has packed a whole lot of history in that time.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">… or why campaign-finance reform never succeeds in America ...</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A sampling of the wisdom of Americans from Ben Franklin to Cameron Crowe</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A student of an underappreciated literary genre selects some books that may change the way you see what you do.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">How women entrepreneurs reshaped the American economic landscape in the wake of World War II</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A critic looks at 10 movies that show how Americans work together.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">After Henry Ford changed America, his grandson accomplished something almost as amazing.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The country’s financial hub has a long history of lying, cheating, and stealing.</span></p>

<p>He was one of America's greatest innovators, but his plan to build a production city in the Amazon ultimately ended in disaster. </p>