Business History Review articles from December 1996

Business History Review archives from December 1996

Selling Silicon Valley: Frederick Terman's model for regional advantage.
December 22, 1996... This paper explores the origins of the Silicon Valley model for regional economic development, and attempts to deploy this model elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Frederick Terman, Stanford's provost, first envisioned its unique...

Vulture capitalism in antebellum America: the 1841 Federal Bankruptcy Act and the exploitation of financial distress.
December 22, 1996... There is, on an average, annually wrecked upon the Florida coast, about fifty vessels.... The great destruction of property consequent upon this state of things, and the hope of gain, have induced a settlement at Key West, where, to adjudicate...

The Comptoir Siderurgique de France, 1930-1939.
December 22, 1996... The French inter-war steel cartels were characterized by contemporaries as powerful trusts, restricting output and raising steel prices. The cartels were cited as a cause for the length of the French depression, the low productivity of the 1930s,...

The changing genderization of bookkeeping in the United States, 1870-1930.
December 22, 1996... During the time period from 1870-1930, economic, social, demographic and educational forces interacted with the separation of accounting from bookkeeping. The result of this interaction was the changing genderization of the bookkeeping workforce....

Studebaker: The Life and Death of an American Corporation.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Richard S. Tedlow In 1910, after witnessing the startup and subsequent bankruptcy of scores of firms in the automobile industry, entrepreneur Walter E. Flanders contemplated the rise of Ford and General Motors: "[H]enceforth, the...

The Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Richard S. Tedlow In 1910, after witnessing the startup and subsequent bankruptcy of scores of firms in the automobile industry, entrepreneur Walter E. Flanders contemplated the rise of Ford and General Motors: "[H]enceforth, the...

The Mechanisms of Governance.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Richard Adelstein It was John R. Commons who, almost seventy-five years ago, first suggested that the individual transaction be taken as the basic unit of economic analysis, and Ronald Coase, some sixty years ago, who first saw...

Gas Pipelines and the Emergence of America's Regulatory State: A History of Panhandle Eastern Corporation, 1928-1993.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Gerald D. Nash If the first half of the twentieth century witnessed the dramatic growth of petroleum as an energy source in American and global economies, the second half was characterized by the emergence of natural gas as a major...

Empire Builder in the Texas Panhandle: William Henry Bush.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Wyatt Wells The settlement of the Southwest remains one of the great epics of American history. Almost everyone knows tales of the Alamo and of cowboys and Indians, and cattle barons and oil millionaires still figure prominently in...

King of the Wildcatters: The Life and Times of Tom Slick, 1883-1930.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Wyatt Wells The settlement of the Southwest remains one of the great epics of American history. Almost everyone knows tales of the Alamo and of cowboys and Indians, and cattle barons and oil millionaires still figure prominently in...

American Plastic: A Cultural History.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Shelley K. Nickles Historians interested in the relationship between business, technology, and culture in twentieth-century America have eagerly awaited this study, the first scholarly book to provide a comprehensive history of...

Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920-1934.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Regina Lee Blaszczyk Susan Smulyan's Selling Radio is the latest addition to the growing body of historical literature on the media in 20th-century America. Building on the technological foundations laid by historian Susan Douglas...

Crusading for Chemistry: The Professional Career of Charles Holmes Herty.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Tami J. Friedman Germaine M. Reed has produced an exhaustively researched chronicle of the life and work of Charles Holmes Herty (1867-1938), a Georgia-born chemist whose career spanned - and helped shape - a period that witnessed...

Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Bruce Fehn In recent years, historians have indicted unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for fostering racist attitudes in their organizations. Even those who have been most critical of CIO unions,...

State and Party in America's New Deal.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Andy Workman This book is the culmination of an intellectual project begun by the authors nearly two decades ago. Their goal was to "address the theoretical issues about the role of the state in capitalist society in an empirically...

American Trade Policy, 1923-1995.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by William M. McClenahan Historians recently have made significant contributions to the understanding of the complexity of American trade policy in this century. Susan Aaronson's Trade and the American Dream (1996), explains the...

Divergent Paths: How Culture and Institutions Have Shaped North American Growth.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Morris Altman This is a provocative, well-written, and well-documented book which is a must read, if only because it reintroduces the question of the importance of culture and institutions as a causal determinant of economic...

The Fall of the U.S. Consumer Electronics Industry: An American Trade Tragedy.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Takashi Hikino The Fall of the U.S. Consumer Electronics Industry by Philip Curtis and The Japanese Television Cartel by David Schwartzman are important and useful books which summarize the arguments and assessments of the...

The Japanese Television Cartel: A Study BAsed on Matsushita v. Zenith.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Takashi Hikino The Fall of the U.S. Consumer Electronics Industry by Philip Curtis and The Japanese Television Cartel by David Schwartzman are important and useful books which summarize the arguments and assessments of the...

Japanese Business Success: The Evolution of a Strategy.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Mark Fruin This is an edited volume originally conceived in honor of Professor Shin'ichi Yonekawa's 60th birthday by some of his students and a few foreign scholars. Kanreki or 60th birthday commemorative volumes have fallen out of...

Loans & Legitimacy: Evolution of Soviet-American Relations, 1919-1933.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Odd Arne Westad This brief volume is an excellent introduction to the author's work on early Soviet-American relations, concentrating on the economic relationship between the two countries from the Russian revolution of 1917 to the...

Ferranti-Packard: Pioneers In Canadian Electrical Manufacturing.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Ken Cruikshank To the extent that Canadian historians have shown any interest in business history, they often have been attracted to the larger corporate stories: the railways, the banks, the utilities, the oil producers, the steel...

Organised Capital: Employers' Associations and Industrial Relations in Northern England, 1880-1939.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Peter Weiler Arthur McIvor's Organised Capital is a model academic study - thoroughly researched, clearly written, and lucidly argued. Focusing on the cotton textile, engineering, and construction industries in one region of...

The Art of Cloaking Ownership: The Case of Sweden.
December 22, 1996... Reviewed by Mark Harrison This book is the outcome of the authors' exhaustive investigation of the wartime activity and interests of the Wallenburg brothers, Jacob and Marcus, prominent in Swedish financial circles of the time. Its main focus...