Has money always been used for buying things? Were debt crises in the ancient world addressed in the same way they are now? What does honor and patriarchy have to do with debt? And what should we know about the origins of our cherished modern conceptions of liberty and property? David Graeber considers the tumultuous present in light of the past.

While it may appear an inevitability, how did capitalism come to take hold in the US? Was slave production in the American South actually capitalist or something else? What was the nature of the Civil War and the emergence of sharecropping in the conflict's wake? Marxist sociologist Charles Post weighs in on these questions, which have been hotly debated for many years on the left, with significant consequences for how we see capitalism's permanence and the nature of racial oppression today.

What does revolution mean to movement elders Grace Lee Boggs and Angela Davis? What should it encompass, and whom should it involve? Boggs and Davis spoke recently in Berkeley. And Daniel Rasmussen tells the story of the largest slave revolt in US history, which took place in 1811 in and around New Orleans.

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln: They may seem an unlikely pair, but they knew of each other, and Marx was intensely interested in the Civil War and the fate of slavery. Marx also influenced the culture and trajectory of US worker radicalism, which fueled the bitter and bloody labor conflicts of late nineteenth-century America. Robin Blackburn writes about all this in a new book.

Diverse ecosystems, bizarre life cycles, evolutionary wonders: John Muir Laws has written about and created drawings of natural phenomena and many living things. In this first-time presentation of the full-length interview, Laws shares stories about bird and lizard behavior, pollination strategies, and more. Also, Katrina Browne has made a film about her slave-trading ancestors.

Is it correct to say that Charles Darwin was a scientist par excellence, and that his theories were rooted solely in empirical study? Or might there have been another side to Darwin, a moral passion that spurred his research on evolution? James Moore contends that Darwin's obsession with human origins was fueled by his contempt for slavery.