Business History Review articles from March 1996

Business History Review archives from March 1996

Chain building: the consolidation of the American newspaper industry, 1953-1980.
March 22, 1996... In 1953, independent publishing families owned 1,300 of America's 1,785 daily newspapers. Publishers saw themselves as guardians of age-old editorial standards and viewed their papers as local institutions, not as commercial enterprises. But by...

Testing for aptitude and motivation in South African industry: the work of the National Institute for Personnel Research, 1946-1973.
March 22, 1996... Introduction It might be presumed that in South Africa, the most racist society in the post-World War II period, white psychologists would have been overwhelmingly attracted to theories that associate differences in intelligence with race,...

Founding dates of the 1994 Fortune 500 U.S. companies.
March 22, 1996... Editor's Note: In 1995, the Harris Corporation, now headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of its founding. The company began as a pioneer in the printing press industry, then evolved in the years after 1895...

Business history holdings at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
March 22, 1996... In this essay, Cynthia Little gives a brief overview of the collections of interest to business historians available at the Histical Society of Pennsylvania. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) is the largest independent library and...

Coordination and Information: Historical Perspectives on the Organization of Enterprise.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by K. Austin Kerr This volume collects the contributions presented at a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It follows Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information...

Debt, Investment, Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by John A. Heitmann Despite all that scholars have said and reinterpreted concerning the 19th century Southern economy, fresh ideas and perspectives continue to surface, often from the periphery of academe rather than the center. This...

Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Steven Lubar In 1966 Brooke Hindle published Technology in Early America: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Some thirty years have passed since that book. How has the history of technology changed? This book, a Festschrift for...

Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by William J. Hausman Add Mark Rose's Cities of Light and Heat to the growing list of first-rate books by historians on the development of urban gas and electric systems. Recent work by David E. Nye (Electrifying America, 1990),...

Strictly Business: Walter Carpenter at Du Pont and General Motors.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Stephen Salsbury During the past fifteen years, the Du Pont company and its leaders have been the subject of substantial scholarly interest and at least three outstanding books, including Graham Taylor and Patricia Sudnik's Du Pont...

Done in Oil: An Autobiography.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Roger M. Olien Unfortunately, the late J. Howard Marshall II will probably be remembered by most readers as the octogenarian who married a comely lass and thus precipitated a fight for control of his sizable assets, and,...

Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United Electrical Workers.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Melvyn Dubofsky The subtitle of this book aptly describes its contents. More than one-third of the text and notes describe the origins and growth of the United Electrical Workers (UE) before communism and the cold war split the...

Hidden in the Home: The Role of Waged Homework in the Modern World-Economy.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Cynthia R. Daniels In a rural town in upstate New York, Lucy Morse lives with her husband and eight children on a small farm. Lucy and her husband grow and can most of the fruits and vegetables that will sustain them through the...

The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880-1930.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by David McCreery The Banana Men divides rather clearly into two parts, reflecting the different interests and talents of its two authors. Thomas Schoonover's introductory chapter provides an overview of theories of "social...

On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by John Horne It has been argued for some time now that far from liberating British women (partial female suffrage notwithstanding), World War I was at best ambivalent and at worst deeply conservative in its impact on gender...

Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution: 1862-1969.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Leigh Sparks "Have a break, Have a KitKat." "Don't forget the fruit gums, Mum." "Polo - the mint with the hole!" Anybody who grew up in Great Britain since the Second World War will recognize these phrases. All are key components...

Information, Mediation, and Institutional Development: The Rise of Large-Scale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870-1919.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Arthur Donovan This is a theoretically ambitious, densely empirical and intensely argued study in business history. The book's subtitle identifies its subject - British Shipping from 1870 to 1919. Its evidential base is impressive...

The City of London, vol. II: Golden Years, 1890-1914.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Ranald Michie How can there ever be an end to history when the subject matter is so vast and the ways of interpreting the past so varied? In 1992, I published a book that sought to explain why the city of London had become such an...

The Brothers: The Hidden World of Japan's Richest Family.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Bernstein These two well-researched books recount the Tsutsumi family's emergence as one of the world's richest clans. In doing so, they profile entrepreneurs in the Japanese service sector, rather than the manufacturing...

Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the Seibu-Saison Enterprises in Twentieth-Century Japan.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Bernstein These two well-researched books recount the Tsutsumi family's emergence as one of the world's richest clans. In doing so, they profile entrepreneurs in the Japanese service sector, rather than the manufacturing...

Wealth of Contrasts: Nyegaard & Co. - A Norwegian Pharmaceutical Company, 1874-1985.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Geoffrey Tweedale Business histories of pharmaceutical companies are rare, so this study of Nyegaard - a world leader in the drugs and technology of diagnostic imaging - is welcome. Though commissioned by Hafslund Nycomed, the...