Capitalism

Ben Bernanke once told Milton Friedman flatly that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression and promised not to repeat the mistake, a rare case of a sitting central banker conceding a specific historical argument outright.

Economists call the switch to steam and factories the most important event in human history since farming began, yet historians still argue whether ordinary workers were better off for a century after it started.

The Roaring Twenties is a name applied after the fact to a decade that farmers, miners and most Black Americans experienced very differently from the cities that gave the label its evidence.