Session Abstract

The year 2013 marks the 100^th anniversary of the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, which gave Congress the power to create a federal income tax and forever altered how the federal government raises revenue.  As anniversaries go, this one will likely pass without much notice, swamped as it will be by commemorations of the Battle of Gettysburg and the Emancipation Proclamation.  Yet the nation’s politics are increasingly shaped by the partisan politics of taxation.  The purpose of this roundtable session, which gathers together a distinguished group of political and economic historians, is to use this anniversary to consider the historical importance of taxation to American politics and to provide historical perspective on our current taxation debates.  Panelists will draw from their research on taxation and American slavery, the Progressive era origins of income taxation, the postwar politics of taxation, and the relationship between tax policy and America’s second Gilded Age to discuss the history of taxation, its role in American state-building, and its contemporary valences in the immediate wake of the 2012 national election.