Business History Review articles from December 1993

Business History Review archives from December 1993

The rigid disk drive industry: a history of commercial and technological turbulence.
December 22, 1993... marketplace, because it viewed the bleeding-edge manufacturers that most needed thin-film heads as indirect competitors.(40) Sensing the opportunity to match component supply and demand more closely, several venture capitalists recruited key IBM...

"The rusty ribbon": John Herbert Orr and the making of the magnetic recording industry, 1945-1960.
December 22, 1993... The magnetic recording of information is utilized in several familiar technologies in the 1990s, including the audio tape recorder, the videocassette recorder, and the computer disk drive, and it is the basis of a major international industry....

A "new" business history? A commentary on the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics.
December 22, 1993... The editor of the Business History Review has asked me, as the oldest "new" economic historian, to make a comment on the 1993 Nobel Prize award in Economics--a comment directed to "real" historians--which I am not--and especially to business...

The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class.
December 22, 1993... Labor historians have long searched for the origins of the American working class. This pursuit has guided scholars from century to century, examining a strike here and a radical organizer there, all in an effort to proclaim the moment when...

Agriculture, Geology, and Society in Antebellum South Carolina: The Private Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 1843.
December 22, 1993... This volume, edited by William M. Mathew, is the first published version of the private diary kept by Edmund Ruffin during his highly publicized agricultural and geological survey of South Carolina in 1843. Ruffin, long a prominent southern...

The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Nation's First Railroad, 1828-1853.
December 22, 1993... In the decade of the 1820s, several American cities were seeking the trade of the new western states. The businessmen of New York City and Philadelphia favored canals and river steamboats, but the merchants of Baltimore decided to build a...

Fair to Middlin': The Antebellum Cotton Trade of the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee River Valley.
December 22, 1993... Lynn Willoughby's starting point is that southern economic history has been dominated so long by study of the plantations and by daunting cliometric methods that other good subjects have often been pushed aside. She writes, in contrast, as a...

A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public.
December 22, 1993... Scholars of nineteenth-century American culture have made great strides over the past decade in bringing antebellum literary culture into sharper historical focus, but economics has played a smaller part in their discussions than the period that...

The Black Press in Mississippi: 1865-1985.
December 22, 1993... The thesis of Julius Thompson's book on the black press in Mississippi is that civil liberties, the First Amendment, and property rights are inseparable. Although the Civil War emancipated blacks from bondage in Mississippi, freedom never...

Commercial Bank Liquidity Management, Discretionary Reserve Behavior, and the Allocation of Credit: 1863-1913.
December 22, 1993... James Carter uses bank portfolio selection theories to explore banker concerns with liquidity management and to attempt to explain the observed pattern of bank credit allocation from the establishment of the national banking system to the passage...

A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management Since Taylor.
December 22, 1993... Analysis of Frederick W. Taylor's impact on organizational theory and practice has acquired renewed vitality in the past twenty years. Two books by Daniel Nelson set at least part of the foundation for this revival: Managers and Workers: Origins...

Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise.
December 22, 1993... The further one goes in this very interesting and very timely collection of essays, the product of a 1988 symposium underwritten by the Woodrow Wilson Center's Division of U.S. Studies, the more one senses a shadow stealing across the face of its...

America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.
December 22, 1993... Recent histories of the telephone industry, Claude Fischer observes, share a common vantage point. Told from the top down, they present the "corporate" version of how this new, profound technology was produced and diffused throughout the economy...

Mill & Mine: The CF & I in the Twentieth Century.
December 22, 1993... The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF & I) has drawn scholarly attention on two major issues: its participation in the Colorado coal strike of 1913-14, which culminated in the Ludlow Massacre, and the establishment of an Employee Representation...

Foley & Lardner, Attorneys at Law: 1842-1992.
December 22, 1993... Business relies extensively on lawyers, but there are comparatively few historical studies of law firms. This book by Ellen D. Langill is therefore a welcome addition to recent works by Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, Kenneth Lipartito and...

Vertical Challenge: The Hiller Aircraft Story.
December 22, 1993... Like many industries, aircraft manufacturing has been dominated by a few key entrepreneurs; Glenn Curtiss, William Boeing, Donald Douglas, Glenn Martin, and Reuben Fleet most readily come to mind. In comparison to these industry giants, Stanley...

Strategy, Structure, and Antitrust in the Carbonated Softdrink Industry.
December 22, 1993... This is a novel and original book. It combines historical perspective, modern economic theory, and econometric analysis to argue that the carbonated soft-drink industry has been fundamentally misunderstood by its critics. The book is especially...

Was There a Pepsi Generation Before Pepsi Discovered It? Youth-Based Segmentation in Marketing.
December 22, 1993... Stanley Hollander and Richard Germain start with a relatively modest goal: to demonstrate, simply, that "youth-based segmentation" was utilized by marketers of all kinds long before the debut of the famous Pepsi advertising campaigns of the...

Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971.
December 22, 1993... J. Samuel Walker, historian at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, wisely chose "a changing environment" as his subtitle for Containing the Atom. In the decade that this volume covers, Americans' attitudes toward their political, technological,...

Shifting the Burden: The Struggle Over Growth and Corporate Taxation.
December 22, 1993... Cathie Martin's excellent study of U.S. corporate income tax policy spanning the presidencies of John F. Kennedy through Ronald Reagan is more concerned with elucidating the workings of underlying processes than with evaluating the efficacy of...

The Future of American Banking: Managing for Change.
December 22, 1993... David Rogers's book is a lively, anecdotal account of the recent strategic and organizational directions taken by four of the leading money-center commercial banks. The book does not directly address the future of banking, as the title implies,...

Lost Prophets: An Insider's History of the Modern Economists.
December 22, 1993... Have you ever noticed that experts generally have a poor record in predictions? The reason may be that they usually have a stake in a particular paradigm, which is used as a filing cabinet for assorted happenings. Over time situations change, but...

Farm, Factory and Fortune: New Studies in the Economic History of the Maritime Provinces.
December 22, 1993... Regional development has become the central theme in most historical writing concerning Canada's Atlantic provinces, and all eleven essays in this collection bear on that subject in one way or another. As Kris Inwood observes in one of his two...

Oil and Revolution in Mexico.
December 22, 1993... Jonathan Brown has written a detailed and exhaustive history of the oil industry in Mexico during the years 1880 to 1920. The work is based on extensive research in the primary sources--archives in Germany, the Netherlands, England, Mexico, and...

The Political Economy of Brazilian Oil.
December 22, 1993... Brazilian state control of the petroleum industry began in 1938 with the founding of the National Petroleum Council. Strongly influenced by Argentine practice as manifested in YPF, Latin America's first government oil company, and by the resource...

The Company Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age.
December 22, 1993... The popular image of company towns has not radically altered since the late nineteenth century, when they were alternately portrayed as models of stable industrial communities and as engines of claustrophobic social control. Settlements such as...

Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labor Process in the Production of the Built Environment.
December 22, 1993... This book seeks to combine theoretical analysis of the rise of capitalist building production with a detailed case study of the building of Somers Town, an area of London about one mile northwest of the City, from the 1780s to the 1830s. Linda...

Capitalism in Crisis: International Responses to the Great Depression.
December 22, 1993... The closer the scrutiny of policy responses to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the narrower seem the possibilities for innovation, and the more powerful seem the political and financial constraints in favor of fiscal retrenchment, sound...

Entrepreneurship, Networks and Modern Business.
December 22, 1993... What is entrepreneurship and how is successful entrepreneurship to be measured and assessed? Obviously central to any conceptualization of business history, these questions have attracted no generally accepted answers and, indeed, even the...

White-Collar Crime in Modern England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845-1929.
December 22, 1993... This study concentrates on a particular corner of white-collar crime, that of financial fraud in the world of big business and finance. George Robb argues that the transgressions of the middle-class bankers, brokers, and company directors and...

An Administrative Bureau During the Old Regime: The Bureau of Commerce and Its Relations to French Industry from May 1781 to November 1783.
December 22, 1993... Harold Parker provides an account of the work of the Bureau of Commerce in the early 1780s that is of great value to business historians, because it so well illuminates the relations between the French state and industry at that time. The nature...

The Triumph of Corporate Capitalism in France: 1867-1914.
December 22, 1993... Economic historians of post-revolutionary France used to be preoccupied with explaining the country's backwardness relative to its neighbors. They described France as the country of family-scale enterprises and workshops concentrating on luxury...

Paribas, 1872-1992: Europe and the World.
December 22, 1993... The Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, or Paribas as it is commonly known, is the prototype of the French banque d'affaires. Since its foundation in 1872, it has also ranked among the major French banks, alongside the big banques de depots--Credit...

Das Reichskommissariat fur die Behandlung feindlichen Vermogens im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Eine Studie zur Verwaltungs-, Rechts- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1993... This is a brief study of the interministerial and interagency struggles that surrounded the administration of enemy assets in Nazi Germany. The Reichskommissariat fur die Behandlung feindlichen Vermogens, which was a creation of the German...

Labor and Economic Growth in Five Asian Countries: South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines.
December 22, 1993... In this relatively thin book (120 pages), Walter Galenson provides an extremely useful overview of labor market changes in five Asian countries, two East Asian countries (South Korea and Taiwan), and three Southeast Asian countries (Malaysia,...