The Rosetta Stone to the US Code: A New History of Taxation. A Seminar with Charles Adams

Join tax historian Charles Adams for a week-long seminar in a new history of taxation from the ancient world to the present. His three books on the topic have highlighted the role that the state’s relentless drive for more revenue has inspired wars, revolutions, and every manner of political upheaval. And yet historians who are not usually alert to the economic dynamic behind social change have missed the role that taxation has played.

In demonstrating his theory that taxes are a prime mover of history, Adams has proven himself to a master researcher. Rather than taking others’ word for it, he examines primary documents to discover new ways of looking at major events in the Hebrew scriptures, assassinations in Rome, European history in the Middle Ages, the French Revolution, the Civil War, and so much more.

This ten-lecture seminar runs Monday through Friday, 10:00-11:30 a.m., and 2:00-3:30-p.m. Central Time, each day; and covers the full range of Adams’s research that went into the production of his books:

• Fight, Flight, and Fraud: The Story of Taxation
• For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization
• Those Dirty Rotten Taxes
• When In the Course of Human Events

Lectures

1. “The Making of a Tax Historian”

2. “The Bible’s World of Taxes”

3. “The Kaleidoscopic Romans”

4. “The Middle Ages”

5. “The Swiss: From William Tell to No Tell”

6. “Tax Revolt in the Netherlands” 

7. “After the Magna Carta“

8. “The Civil War”

9. “American Taxation”

10. “Learning from the Past: What History Teaches”

Adams will also be available for informal discussion sessions.