Business History Review articles from March 1991

Business History Review archives from March 1991

Small business in America: a historiographic survey.
March 22, 1991... In the last decade the study of smaller businesses has been reanimated and refreshed. Contemporary debates about a "crisis of mass production" and the rise of "flexible specialization" have given developments in the smaller business unit a...

Diversity in diversity: flexible production and American industrialization, 1880-1930.
March 22, 1991... The following case studies and analysis of the machine tool and jewelry manufacturing industries attempt to set the stage for a reconsideration of "the other side of industrialization" in the United States during the Second...

Market development, industrial development: the case of the American corset trade, 1860-1920.
March 22, 1991... The clothing trade in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides examples across the spectrum of industrial organization, and it thus offers an opportunity to compare activities and to account...

Dime store chains: the making of organization men, 1880-1940.
March 22, 1991... The following article examines the creation and development of a unique American business institution, the dime store chain. The essay focuses on the store managers--their ethnic, social, and educational background, the rules ...

"To Serve Well and Faithfully": Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800.
March 22, 1991... Critical as early labor forms--free, indentured, and slave--were in shaping the economy and society of the American colonies, the extent of historical research on colonial labor markets has been modest. Indentured servitude in particular has...

Liberty, Property, and the Future of Constitutional Development.
March 22, 1991... Since 1937, the United States Supreme Court has become ever more deferential when reviewing legislation that impinges on what the editors of this volume refer to as economic rights"--"the rights we all enjoy to possess, use, exchange, and...

Erie Water West: A History of the Erie Canal, 1792-1854.
March 22, 1991... In the last few years, the reissue of such classics as Leonard Levy's The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw (1957), Harry Scheiber's Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820-1861 (1969), Oscar Handlin and...

The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States.
March 22, 1991... In this ambitious and detailed examination of technological progress in the nineteenth-century boot and shoe industry, Ross Thomson has provided an important case study of the process by which the increase in inventive and innovative activity...

Edison and the Business of Innovation.
March 22, 1991... Thomas Edison has inspired more than six dozen biographies, yet solid scholarship on the great inventor is remarkably thin. Most early studies rest on a shaky foundation of reminiscences and rehashed anecdotes; many shade into mythology and...

Accountancy Comes of Age: The Development of an American Profession.
March 22, 1991... In this extension of his doctoral dissertation, Paul Miranti traces the role of professional associations in the growth of the accountancy profession in the United States. Although other authors, notably Gary Previts and Barbara Merino in A...

Union Pacific: The Rebirth, 1894-1969.
March 22, 1991... The second volume of Maury Klein's history of the Union Pacific Railroad spans the era from the bankruptcy and reorganization of the 1890s to the creation of the Union Pacific Corporation in 1969. The story of one of the nation's premier...

The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois.
March 22, 1991... When introduced to Illinois in 1929 hybrid corn seeds yielded only slightly more ears of corn than naturally open-pollinated varieties. Yet between 1932 and 1936 the percentage of Illinois cornfields planted with hybrid seed rose from scarcely...

What's a Coal Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining.
March 22, 1991... Keith Dix, the leading authority on work relations in the Appalachian coal region, has written an important book about mechanization in the mining industry. He emphasizes the workers' response to new machines at the point of production and...

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance.
March 22, 1991... The publication of this massive volume covering the original Morgan firm and its three successor enterprises through the 1980s represents a truly impressive achievement. For his efforts, Ron Chernow won the National Book Award in the...

Easy Money: Oil Promoters and Investors in the Jazz Age.
March 22, 1991... The authors' purpose is to explore Charles P. Kindleberger's conclusion that modern speculative manias result in very little harm to capital markets or to industrial enterprise (manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises...

The U.S. Tire Industry: A History.
March 22, 1991... Designed as a classroom text, this short, densely written book is also a useful reference work, a guide to the secondary literature of the industry, and an introduction to the history of manufacturing in this century. As Michael French argues,...

The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order.
March 22, 1991... The New Deal and the generation of political and economic stability that it ushered in continue to be a mine for lessons about the useful if not unproblematic role of government in economic development and for debates about the constitution of...

Eli Lilly: A Life, 1885-1977.
March 22, 1991... This study of the life of Eli Lilly, successful industrialist, man of great wealth, and eminent philanthropist, is based largely on materials in the archives of Eli Lilly and Company. That James Madison was allowed "full and free access to [the...

A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History.
March 22, 1991... The bibliography of oral history is long on practice and short on theory. Many historians, correctly citing the cross-disciplinary nature of the field, prefer to describe it as a technique or method, words that imply a learned process rather...

The Development of the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry: A Grown Man's Game.
March 22, 1991... A Grown Man's Game is an annotated selection from the papers of Henry Doyle, an entrepreneur who played a brief but significant role in the Canadian Pacific Coast salmon industry at the turn of this century and remained a close observer of...

The Canadian Fur Trade in the Industrial Age.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1991... The Canadian Fur Trade in the Industrial Age is a valuable addition to our knowledge of the Canadian fur trade. As Arthur Ray points out in the preface (p. xv), we know much about the eighteenth- and early nineteenth century trade, but little...

The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World.
March 22, 1991... The Rise of Merchant Empires is composed of thirteen chapters that originated as papers presented at an eponymous conference held at the University of Minnesota in 1987. The authors include many renowned historians of commerce, but there is no...

World Economy and World Politics, 1924-1931: From Reconstruction to Collapse.
March 22, 1991... The last fifteen years have seen a revolution in historical scholarship dealing with the interwar years--that two-decade interregnum between the century's devastating world wars. Books like Harold James's The German Slump (1986), Recasting...

Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660-1800.
March 22, 1991... It was in 1852 that the first major English legislation on patents was enacted by Parliament and the Patent Office established. The Patent Office could thus be said to be a product of the industrial Revolution. To speak of a patent system in...

International Competition and Industrial Change: Essays in the History of Mining and Metallurgy, 1800-1950.
March 22, 1991... Studies of international corporations have centered on the manufacturing sector and have given only limited attention to the critical role of mining ventures in the evolution of multinational enterprises(MNEs). This collection of essays offers...

Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace.
March 22, 1991... The weaknesses of this book stem from two sources: the first is the aims and style of the series of which it forms part, the main ambition of which, according to its editor Alex Robertson, is to bring to a wider readership the importance of...

The British Aircraft Industry.
March 22, 1991... This book is the first in a new series of undergraduate texts on British industries in the twentieth century. The series, according to the general editor, starts with a "success story," the aircraft industry. Keith Hayward's book does indeed...

A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940.
March 22, 1991... The last few years have seen a number of new works on the history of shorter hours movements in Europe and North America. In part, this can be seen as an academic response to the demands of contemporary workers and their unions that working...

Reduced worktime and the Management of Production.
March 22, 1991... The last few years have seen a number of new works on the history of shorter hours movements in Europe and North America. In part, this can be seen as an academic response to the demands of contemporary workers and their unions that working...

Before Copyright: The French Book-Privelege System, 1498-1526.
March 22, 1991... This very technical and narrow book, the fruit of thirty years of research by Elizabeth Armstrong, addresses the question: "What sort of book could result?" (p. xi) from the patient collecting of facts, in this case about book privileges. This...

Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th centuries.
March 22, 1991... Although much has been written recently about the development of the French Left and the social history of the French people, including workers, it is over sixty years since the publication of the last general history of the French working...

Die Bedeutung der Kommunikation fur Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.
March 22, 1991... This book makes available the papers presented at a 1987 (West) German conference organized around the theme of "the significance of communication for economy and society." The articles, ranging from the High Middle Ages to the present, discuss...

The Diamond Ring: Business, Politics, and Precious Stones in South Africa, 1867-1947.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1991... There has never been any shortage of interest in the industrial history of South Africa. The economy was built on diamonds and gold, and the heroic figures of the pioneer years at Kimberley and on the Rand have attracted numerous journalists...

International Trade in Services.
March 22, 1991... International Trade in Services is a much narrower book than its title suggests. Its subject is the services trade of Australia and the countries of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The book begins with a chapter on the...