Tax systems thus both reflect and affect cultural beliefs about community, loyalty, government, and the purposes of collective life. The mass of people, for example, may oppose a tax law, but if the relevant elite has firm hands on the reins of power that law will remain on the books. One must not assume that, even in a democracy, a majority of the population approves of any particular policy. Only the large patterns of words and actions reveal which taxes have popular legitimacy and which do not. This, then, is a cultural history of taxes.
Cultural history is the history of meanings.
It explores words and symbols, rhetoric and assumptions, debates and divisions and shared beliefs, with the goal of understanding how people in the past made sense of their world. The last time a historian published a broad-lens history of American taxation was 1942, when Sidney Ratner wrote American Taxation . Later editions added some updates, but Ratner's analysis was framed during World War II and reflects that era. Since then, a few historians, political scientists, and economists have written articles and monographs on taxation during specific time periods, but the literature remains sparse. Class, gender, and race all play important roles in my analysis.