Business History Review articles from December 1994

Business History Review archives from December 1994

Foundations, statistics, and state-building: Leonard P. Ayres, the Russell Sage Foundation, and U.S. government statistics in the First World War. (Experts, War, And The State)
December 22, 1994... quite sophisticated statistical controls. In the Second World War, Ayres served as coordinator of statistics in the Office of the Undersecretary of War from 1940 to 1942 and then as a consultant with the War Manpower Commission from 1943 to 1945....

Physiological science and scientific management in the progressive era: Frederic S. Lee and the Committee on Industrial Fatigue. (Experts, War, And The State)
December 22, 1994... Alejandra C. Laszlo, "Physiology of the Future: Institutional Styles at Columbia and Harvard," in Physiology in the American Context, ed. Geison, 85. 61 Flinn, "Industrial Aspects of Human Fatigue," 293: U.S. Surgeon General, Annual Report,...

The counterproductive management of science in the Second World War: Vannevar Bush and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. (Experts, War, And The State)
December 22, 1994... Conant believed that Bushes decision to fund wartime research by contract was "revolutionary" and "the most far-reaching new concept that has been introduced into the academic world for the last one hundred years."(131) Don Price, a New Dealer...

Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis.
December 22, 1994... This book is not a railroad history. It is rather an economic, social, and political history of southwestern Virginia from the late 1840s through the Civil War. As such it has very considerable value, although its focus, like its title, sometimes...

Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850-1920.
December 22, 1994... Alexander von Hoffman's Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920 fills a gap in the urban history literature by examining a subunit of the city (though "neighborhood" may not be quite accurate for an area with...

Panic in Paradise: Florida's Banking Crash of 1926.
December 22, 1994... Raymond Vickers applies a lawyer's eye to the banking panic of 1926 in Florida, and he argues that his is the "first work to analyze state and national records" on the subject (p. 1). Perhaps he is correct for Florida, but certainly for Nevada...

Chester I. Barnard and the Guardians of the Managerial State.
December 22, 1994... William G. Scott states his objectives clearly in Chester I. Barnard and the Guardians of the Managerial State. He seeks to explicate Barnard's writings, to place Barnard's ideology and values in their proper historical context, and to assess...

The Origins and Evolution of the Field of Industrial Relations in the United States.
December 22, 1994... In this clearly written book, Bruce E. Kaufman explores and analyzes the emergence of industrial relations as an academic discipline during the interwar years (1919-39); its golden age during the era of U.S. hegemony and prosperity after the...

The Union Inspiration in American Politics: The Autoworkers and the Making of a Liberal Industrial Order.
December 22, 1994... In an important and timely study of the American industrial system, Stephen Amberg seeks to explain both the creation and the destruction of the New Deal order. Most accounts, Amberg asserts, share the belief in the "centrality of labor and...

The State and Labor in Modern America.
December 22, 1994... Since the late 1970s a spirited three-sided debate has been proceeding among historians and legal scholars regarding the achievements and shortcomings of the pluralist labor relations system set in place during the 1930s and 1940s. Liberals...

Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History.
December 22, 1994... The history of old age in America represents one of the few healthy enterprises in an otherwise depressed market for historical research. Although the field owes much to an older generation of historians such as David Van Tassel and David Hackett...

Canadian Papers in Business History, vol. 2.
December 22, 1994... Two volumes of Canadian Papers in Business History have now been published. Both serve as benchmarks in this type of historical inquiry, and they have been most capably edited by Peter Baskerville. The first volume (1989) had an interesting mix...

The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana.
December 22, 1994... The sugar plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana conjure up a Hobbesian nightmare where life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Yet, despite experiencing arduous work regimes and grim living conditions, slaves in both regions, Roderick...

Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America.
December 22, 1994... It is hard to follow a trail when those who have gone before cover their tracks. The truism might explain why neither Latin Americans nor North Americans know much about the twentieth-century role of the Rockefeller Foundation in promoting...

Engines of Growth: The State and Transnational Auto Companies in Brazil.
December 22, 1994... Helen Shapiro has written an excellent and important book on the Brazilian automobile industry. In Engines of Growth, Shapiro details the bargaining between the Brazilian state and transnational automobile firms in the 1950s, as Brazil embarked...

The European Economy: 1750-1914.
December 22, 1994... A compelling premise inspires this collection of essays: that Sidney Pollard's spatial approach to analyzing European development is superior in many ways to taking individual national boundaries as demarcations (Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The...

The Industrial Revolution and British Society.
December 22, 1994... At a time when much of the literature on the process of industrialization in Britain is dominated by quantitative analyses, of greater and lesser accessibility, it is refreshing to find a set of lively and well-written essays that inform and...

Aufsteig der Kleinen: Multinationale Unternehmen aus funf kleinen Staaten vor 1914.
December 22, 1994... Research on the evolution of multinational enterprise has hitherto focused on large-scale firms based in large countries. Harm G. Schroter has examined companies that were set up in tile smaller European countries and then grew into multinational...

War and Economy in the Third Reich.
December 22, 1994... The relationship between war and economy in the Third Reich has been a major bone of contention among scholars ever since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, even during Adolf Hitler's regime interpretations of the nature of Nazism and...

The Economic History of Italy: 1860-1990.
December 22, 1994... This dense volume by a major scholar of Italian economic history may pose a problem for the nonspecialist. Despite a long introductory chapter and three appendixes, the book provides little systematic treatment of long-term political and social...