Business History Review articles from December 1992

Business History Review archives from December 1992

Plush endeavors: an analysis of the modern American soft-toy industry.
December 22, 1992... In the early 1980s parents were eager to find Care Bears, Garfields, Smurfs, or Snoopies for their offspring. Whether for celebrating birthdays, Christmas, Hanukkuh, Easter, or as spur-of-the-moment gifts, such soft toys were favorite presents...

T.C. Power & Bro.: the rise of a small western department store, 1870-1902.
December 22, 1992... When studying retailing and its role in developing the American mass market, historians traditionally have focused their attention on large department stores. An analysis of the influence of small department stores in the growth of...

The decline of child labor in the U.S. fruit and vegetable canning industry: law or economics?
December 22, 1992... workers and on the mothers who came with them. In 1889, 36 Baltimore canneries each employed, on average, 362 women and children, 19 percent of whom were under eighteen. There were 152 rural canneries, each employing, on average, 42 women and...

Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System.
December 22, 1992... With the first sentence of her introduction, Barbara Solow places this useful volume in its proper context. "The inclusion of the New World in the international economy ranks among the most important events in modern history. Slavery was the...

Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854-1868.
December 22, 1992... In Cotton & Capital, Richard Abbott offers a solid, informative account of the sectional conflict's radicalizing impact as seen through the eyes of Boston's business community and as revealed through their actions. Abbott concentrates his...

The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South.
December 22, 1992... "Wee doo not want a Master or owner Neither a driver with his Whip wee want a Friend," a group of South Carolina freedmen wrote president Abraham Lincoln in March 1864. This plea crystallized the alternatives that most freedmen and -women...

James Bowron: The Autobiography of a New South Industrialist.
December 22, 1992... While reading this autobiography, I met a ninety-year-old woman from Birmingham, Alabama, who knew James Bowron, and she insisted that the locals pronounced his name as "Baron"--fitting perhaps for one of the iron and steel masters of the...

Palace Car Prince: A Biography of George Mortimer Pullman.
December 22, 1992... The name Pullman brings to mind a series of flashing images: comfortable railroad passenger cars, cold-hearted entrepreneur, and late nineteenth century labor defeats. Indeed, George Pullman is regarded by historians both as a powerful...

Hecla: A Century of Western Mining.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1992... Hecla is the story of the Hecla Mining Company and its management over the past century. The story begins in 1885 when one James Toner, an obscure prospector, staked a claim in the rapidly developing Coeur d'Alene mining district of northern...

Hanging by a Thread: Social Change in Southern Textiles.
December 22, 1992... As the editors of this anthology observe, the textile industry has long posed essential questions for scholars of industrialization. In large measure because of three factors--the relatively small initial capital investment required, the...

The Depression and the Urban West Coast: 1929-1933.
December 22, 1992... In this slender volume, William H. Mullins has performed a valuable service for historians of all kinds--business, economic, urban, social, and political--whose interests center on the twentieth-century West. Mullins provides in this book a...

Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900-1945.
December 22, 1992... Robert E. Kohler is a professor of the history of science at the University of Pennsylvania, but he has written a richly detailed and provocative history of a case study in management. Between 1900 and 1945, the Rockefeller Foundation and the...

Chicago's North Michigan Avenue: Planning and Development, 1900-1930.
December 22, 1992... John W. Stamper's Chicago's North Michigan Avenue: Planning and Development, 1900-1930 might better be subtitled "Architecture and Building," for Stamper discusses the development of North Michigan Avenue primarily through the design and...

The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area: 1880-1930.
December 22, 1992... Electric power is so ubiquitous and so essential today, and the story of Thomas Edison's development of an electric lighting system has been told so effectively (most recently by Robert Friedel and Paul Israel in Edison's Electric Light, 1986)...

A History of Industrial Power in the United States: 1780-1930, volume 3, The Transmission of Power.
December 22, 1992... Volume 2 of Louis Hunter's trilogy on industrial power in the United States, published shortly after his death in 1984, carried the ominous warning by the Hagley Museum and Library, which took responsibility for publishing it, that "the...

The Portable Radio in American Life.
December 22, 1992... Although this is not a novel or a murder mystery, I found its closing pages to be as gripping, revealing, and rewarding as those of any book I have read. After 200-odd pages of material that may remind the reader of a driver in the desert...

Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975.
December 22, 1992... Something funny happened to nuclear power in America during its odyssey toward commercial success. An enterprise that Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, launched in the early 1950s with heady promises of "electrical energy...

More Profile than Courage: The New York City Transit Strike of 1966.
December 22, 1992... On New Year's Day in 1966, members of the Transit Workers Union (TWU) struck the New York Transit Authority in violation of the state's Condon-Wadlin Act, which bars walkouts by municipal workers. For almost two weeks, TWU members remained off...

A History of Small Business in America.
December 22, 1992... Mansel G. Blackford has written a cogent and readable addition to our understanding of American business, one that should be strongly considered by anyone teaching an American business history course, particularly a course that depends heavily...

The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure.
December 22, 1992... Economist Juliet Schor convincingly demonstrates that wage-earning Americans today work a month more per year than they did in 1969. In a sophisticated analysis of data, she forcefully challenges the common-sense view that increased...

The Revolution in U.S. Finance.
December 22, 1992... The 1980s were a nightmare for U.S. banks and thrifts. More of them failed during this decade than at any time since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the pain is not yet over. The cleanup of the thrift industry will occupy much of the...

The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress.
December 22, 1992... In this ambitious, chronologically comprehensive survey, economic historian Joel Mokyr surveys the relationship between technology and economic progress from antiquity to the eve of the First World War. Mokyr seeks to explain why some societies...

Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776-1809.
December 22, 1992... Vague images of the British industrial revolution inform a great deal of contemporary discussion of technological and economic change. This is seldom more true than when opponents of this or that apparent progress are labeled "Luddites." Few...

International Competition and Strategic Response in the Textile Industries since 1870.
December 22, 1992... This volume, which was first published as a special issue of the journal Business History (October 1990), is a collection of seven articles on various aspects of the British textile industry since 1870. Its chief concern is international...

A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations, 1941-1946.
December 22, 1992... The grand and familiar theme of Randall Woods's sadly undependable book is "America's arrival as a superpower and Britain's departure." In the Second World War, Britain dissipated wealth, accumulated massive debts in sterling--"the sterling...

Banks and Money: International and Comparative Finance in History.
December 22, 1992... This collection of articles by economic historians covers a long span of time, from the eighteenth century ("Views of Fiat Currency in Britain and the American Colonies," the first article, by Edwin Perkins) to the 1970s (when an attempt was...

Organising Business for War: Corporatist Economic Organisation During the Second World War.
December 22, 1992... This book is the product of an international collaborative research project on business interests and associations. Prompted by the historical dimensions of their research and by the current spate of fiftieth anniversaries related to the Second...

The Growth of Multinationals.
December 22, 1992... These three volumes initiate a new series, the International Library of Critical Writings in Business History. Each volume consists of a brief introductory essay, followed by about twenty-five selections, many of them seminal works in their...

Economic Stabilization and Debt in Developing Countries.
December 22, 1992... Richard Cooper packs a good deal of information about the antecedents and evolution of the less-developed country (LDC) debt crisis into this small book. A major source for the book is an ongoing World Bank--sponsored study of debt accumulation...

The World Bank Group: A Guide to Information Sources.
December 22, 1992... This is a critical bibliography on the World Bank Group, the Washington-based network of intergovernmental organizations that has played a leading role in the provision of economic assistance to Third World governments and in the articulation...

Union of Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar Germany.
December 22, 1992... German unions received two disguised blessings after the Second World War: a labor law that unions fiercely opposed and unified and aggressive employers' organizations. The works councils created by the law (which the unions ultimately...

Bulls in the China Shop and Other Sino-American Business Encounters.
December 22, 1992... Although at various points the Chinese perspective is touched on, this book is primarily about the experiences of American business people in the People's Republic of China during the 1980s. The manuscript was completed late enough to take...

Division of Labour: Industrial Relations in the Chifley Years, 1945-49.
December 22, 1992... In this extensively researched and detailed account of Australian labor relations after the Second World War, Tom Sheridan provides an interesting case study of how politics can skew the relations among industrial actors. Sheridan seems to...