The late nineteenth-century notion of moving American public finance toward more direct and graduated forms of taxation was an idea that was embedded in and born out of a larger transatlantic web of intellectual exchange. At the center of this international transfer was a group of American...

At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. system of public finance underwent a dramatic, structural transformation. The late nineteenth-century system of indirect taxes, associated mainly with the tariff, was eclipsed in the early decades of the twentieth century by a progressive income...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a group of political economists led the conceptual campaign for a fundamental transformation in the American system of public finance. Responding to the social and political conditions of their times, these public finance economists helped...

Histories of the modern American income tax have generally focused on the role that social and political forces have played in the development of a new tax system. This article seeks to move beyond the social and political determinants to examine the economic factors that facilitated the...