Business History Review articles from March 1997

Business History Review archives from March 1997

Business failure, judicial intervention, and financial innovation: restructuring U.S. railroads in the nineteenth century.
March 22, 1997... Business historians have focused on the American railroads as sources of innovation. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., for instance, has given due credit to the railroads for the invention of modern corporate finance, management, and labor relations...

Exporting the "Gospel of Productivity" United States tecnical assistance and British industry 1945-1960.
March 22, 1997... In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the United States devoted great attention to furthering European recovery. Much of the continent lay in ruins. Surviving industrial capacity was often antiquated or inefficient. Moreover, many...

The price of air power: technological change, industrial policy, and military aircraft contracts in the era of British rearmament, 1935-39.
March 22, 1997... In attempting to explain the protracted decline of British manufacturing industry in the twentieth century, historians frequently argue that there have been fundamental flaws in the industrial policies pursued by the British government.(1)...

American Iron, 1607-1900.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by John N. Ingham Robert Gordon, who is a professor of geophysics and applied mechanics at Yale University, has provided readers with a remarkably clearly written and straightforward discussion of technological developments in the...

The Pottery Industry of Trenton: A Skilled Trade in Transition, 1850-1929.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Bill Gates Marc Stern admits in the first paragraph of his preface that he has "toilet making" in his blood. This statement could mean several different things, but you will have to read The Pottery Industry of Trenton to...

Beyond the Broker State: Federal Policies Toward Small Business, 1936-1961.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Philip Scranton In 1942, as the United States rapidly geared up for war production, President Franklin Roosevelt noted with some asperity that "This Small Business problem has baffled me . . . for two years. We have not met it -...

Triumphant Capitalism: Henry Clay Frick and the Industrial Transformation of America.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Thomas J. Misa Kenneth Warren's biography of Henry Clay Frick is an admirable book, but it is not an outstanding biography in the vein of Joseph Wall's epic treatment of Andrew Carnegie or Maury Klein's revisionist account of Jay...

The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865-1985.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Walter A. Friedman In 1827 two African Americans began the newspaper Freedom's Journal in New York City, in order to, as they put it, plead their own cause. Since that time hundreds of black-owned papers have provided African...

Farm and Factory: Workers in the Midwest, 1880-1990.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Dennis Deslippe For some time historians have been calling for synthetic treatments of U.S. labor history, ones that incorporate the many workplace and community case studies published in the last twenty-five years. Daniel Nelson...

The Great Texas Banking Crash: An Insiders Account.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Wyatt Wells No part of the United States suffered more from financial instability in the 1980s than Texas. There, literally hundreds of banks and savings & loans failed, and bad loans forced nine of the state's ten largest bank...

Profits and Politics: Beaverbook and the Gilded Age of Canadian Finance.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Morris Altman Gregory Marchildon has written an intriguing and fascinating financial history of Canada from the perspective of the wheeling and dealing of one of Canada's leading businessmen during one of the most tumultuous and...

Store Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture of Mass Marketing, 1890-1939.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Richard S. Tedlow This is a difficult book to evaluate in a brief review because both its strengths and its shortcomings are complicated. Generally speaking, Store Wars makes its greatest contribution when it takes the reader down...

British Business History, 1720-1994.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Peter Botticelli This is a useful and thought-provoking book, one that points out both the strengths and the weaknesses of its subject. John Wilson's chief mandate was to write a much-needed textbook on British business history....

The Factory Question and Industrial England 1830-1860.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Geoffrey Tweedale This book examines a well-worn theme: early nineteenth-century British industrialization in what the author describes as the classical territory of the industrial revolution. By this he means the Lancashire cotton...

The History of the Distillers Company, 1877-1939.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Judy Slinn Business history offers many examples of companies incurring public disfavor but few have attracted as much sustained press criticism and hostility as the Distillers Company (DCL). Descriptions range from the...

Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the era of Inflation, 1897-1927.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Elisabeth Glaser In this ambitious and wide-ranging study, Niall Ferguson discusses the German inflation from a new perspective. The author approaches the subject through Hamburg's political and economic history during World War I...

Horse-drawn Cabs and Omnibuses In Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by John P. McKay When the law student hero of Balzac's famous Pere Goriot pays his first social call at an elegant Parisian town house, the butler's contempt overwhelms the young man from the provinces. Scorned for arriving with the...

European Monetary Union since 1848: A Political and Historical Analysis.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Huw Pill Having worked as a central bank economist in Europe during the early 1990s, I am well aware of the rewards offered - and constraints imposed - by the central bank environment. One obtains an insight into the formulation...

Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Theresa McBride Although women are taking to the "net" in large numbers, apparently finding "community on the web," technology, according to the traditional stereotype, is intimidating to women. Technical competence and innovation...

Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by Alfred J. Rieber Thomas Owen has written an unusual and thought-provoking book. A long established authority on imperial Russian business history and a professor at Louisiana State University, Owen seeks to demonstrate how the...