Business History Review articles from June 1994

Business History Review archives from June 1994

Monetary reform and the redemption of national bank notes.
June 22, 1994... 41 Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 2 June 1866, 674-75. 42 Comptroller of the Currency, Annual Report (1866), vi. (Clarke had resigned in mid-1866 in the wake of policy disputes with both McCulloch and Hulburd.) 43 Margaret G. Myers,...

Kindling a flame under federalism: progressive reformers, corporate elites, and the phosphorous match campaign of 1909-1912.
June 22, 1994... On 16 November 1910, John B. Andrews, the secretary of the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL), penned an urgent letter to the association's president, Henry W. Farnam. The letter concerned President William Howard Taft's support...

The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740.
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by William J. Gilmore-Lehne Charles E. Clark offers the first extensive overview of Anglo-American newspapers through 1740. The Public Prints is organized in three parts: metropolitan and provincial English papers before 1740; a...

Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch, 1890-1915.
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by Gaines M. Foster Many studies analyze the creation of a centralized, national business system in late-nineteenth-century America; few explain the impact that this modern economic order had on the rural countryside or explore how...

Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company.
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by Angel Kwolek-Folland The republication of Walter B. Weare's Black Business in the New South makes available once again this important study of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. First published twenty years ago,...

African-American Business Leaders: A Biographical Dictionary.
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by Alexa Benson Henderson This volume, comprising more than eight hundred pages, contains 77 comprehensive biographical essays for 123 individual African American business leaders. Taken together, these individuals represent the most...

Daniel Willard and Progressive Management on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by Walter Licht This book is unabashedly presentist. The author's ultimate concern is with the contemporary American workplace. How can American workers have a greater stake in the performances of their companies? For many, answers...

Creating an American Institution: The Merchandising Genius of J.C. Penney.
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by Mary L. Carsky Mary Elizabeth Curry has written a comprehensive and scholarly treatment on the life and accomplishments of J. C. Penney. This is the first book on either the company or the man to be published since his death in...

Justice Lies in the District: The U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, 1902-1960.
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by Tony Freyer Why study the federal courts? Specialists in formal legal fields, along with policymakers concerned about crime and other pressing public issues, have a ready answer: federal courts are principal enforcers of the laws...

Service Clubs in American Society: Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by Robert H. Wiebe Jeffrey Charles's clear, competent history traces the origins and expansion of three modern associations with public service rationales: Rotary (which dominates his book), Kiwanis, and Lions. Throughout the study...

Pride and Solidarity: A History of the Plumbers and Pipefitters of Columbus, Ohio, 1889-1989.
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by Mark Erlich In the preface, Richard Schneirov suggests that Pride and Solidarity might serve as an instructional tool for new members of Local 189 of the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters (UA) in Columbus, Ohio. In...

Profits of Science: The American Marriage of Business and Technology.
June 22, 1994... Reviewed by Larry Owens Journalists, it seems, have produced some of our best studies of science and technology. In Profits of Science, Robert Teitelman has done it again. A senior editor at Institutional Investor, Teitelman has parlayed his...

Second Thoughts: Myths and Morals of U.S. Economic History.
June 22, 1994... This collection of twenty-four essays by a variety of authors is aimed, according to its editor, at debunking commonly accepted wisdom about our economic past and policies. The vehicle is a "historical economics," said to date from 1957, that...

The New Democracy: Challenging the Social Order in Industrial Ontario, 1914-1925.
June 22, 1994... James Naylor refocuses our attention on the pivotal year in Canadian working-class history, 1919. In doing so he reopens the long debate over "western exceptionalism." Pointing to the Winnipeg General Strike, many Canadian historians have...

Money Doctors, Foreign Debts, and Economic Reforms in Latin America from the 1890s to the Present.
June 22, 1994... "The sentiment of the country seemed to be overwhelmingly in favor of . . . reform, but the stronger the sentiment for reform became, the more diver-sifted were the proposals and the more distant seemed its realization." This quotation, taken...

Poverty and Peasantry in Peru's Southern Andes: 1963-1990.
June 22, 1994... In Poverty and Peasantry R. F. Watters has undertaken the formidable task of trying to explain how Peru's peasants in the southern Andes have adapted to profound changes in the political and economic life of Peru since the 1960s. The focus of...

The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company.
June 22, 1994... Like the "Honourable Men" singled out by Mark Antony in his tribute to Julius Caesar, the "Honourable Company" described by John Keay has more than a little to be ashamed of. And just as Mark Antony's narrative is designed to rouse and inspire...

British Multinational Banking: 1830-1990.
June 22, 1994... By the term British multinational banking, Geoffrey Jones is referring primarily to those London-based banks formed in the nineteenth century that operated almost completely outside Britain. In addition, he covers the twentieth-century...

The Coachmen of Nineteenth-Century Paris: Service Workers and Class Consciousness.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... After long neglect, the service workers of nineteenth-century France, and notably of Paris, are receiving monographic attention; witness Donald Reid's Paris Sewers and Sewermen (1991), Lenard Berlanstein's Big Business and Industrial Conflict...

Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy: 1300-1600.
June 22, 1994... The development of consumer society is a theme that has recently attracted new attention from historians of early modern Europe. This brief volume traces the origins of consumerism to Renaissance Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries...

From Peasant to Entrepreneur: The Survival of the Family Economy in Italy.
June 22, 1994... Commentators have long noted the ironies of Italian economic development. A country lacking raw materials, capital, and a well-integrated market system and beset from its inception with major political and social problems succeeded somehow in...

Strategic Capitalism: Private Business and Public Purpose in Japanese Industrial Finance.
June 22, 1994... This complex, thoughtful book offers much to business historians; it is required reading for those interested in postwar Japan. At first its claims might seem surprising, for Kent Calder presents an analysis of Japanese industrial policy that...