This was the profound insight – under tragic circumstances – learned from the Great Depression. Unemployment insurance and Social Security were introduced together in the 1930s and funded in the same way – through payroll taxes. As President Franklin...

This was the profound insight — under tragic circumstances — learned from the Great Depression. Unemployment insurance and Social Security were introduced together in the 1930s and funded in the same way — through payroll taxes. As President Franklin D....

After he read it, Bonfield bought copies for City Council members. Bonfield said Police Chief Jose L. Lopez has also bought copies for his command staff. "There's a lot of people looking at it," Bonfield said. The book, published in October, is a...

Some years, I resist this silly temptation, but today I won't. My "Best Book" for 2011 was Stanford historian David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. Thinking about possible choices, I was a little...

...of sociology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey."What seems most compelling about so many of the events of 2011 is their uncanny similarity to the narrative that began to unspool in 1932, when the full shock of the Great Depression's impact...

Kennedy details how Operation Ceasefires truly reduced the killing in fractious city neighborhoods Billions of dollars are poured into an unwinnable war on drugs. Gun violence has thinned the ranks of black men, and prisons have claimed others in...