Over the next year, you'll see plenty of stories about the people, battles, speeches, and moments that shaped the nation. Those stories matter. But while planning this project, we kept coming back to a different question: what did it cost?

Every chapter of American history had an economic story underneath it. Someone financed it. Someone profited from it. Someone paid for it. Sometimes the bill came due generations later.

To understand America at 250, we found ourselves going back much further than 1776. The story starts in 1607, when investors in England backed a risky venture called the Virginia Company. Long before there was a United States, there were shareholders, labor shortages, debt, speculation, monopolies, smuggling, and fierce arguments over who should control wealth and power.

Across 250 articles, we look at more than 400 years of American economic history through a simple lens: who paid, who profited, and what happened next.

We believe this story belongs to every American.