Business History Review articles from September 1993

Business History Review archives from September 1993

The German question, the unification of Europe, and the European market strategies of Germany's chemical and electrical industries, 1900-1992. (German Business History)
September 22, 1993... Farbenindustrie AG in the United States, 1920-38," in Teichova et al., eds., Multinational Enterprise, 171-84. 53 See Plumpe, IG Farbenindustrie, 115ff. 54 Gottfried Plumpe, "Ansatze zur Zusammenarbeit zwischen der deutschen und...

The German National Railway Company, 1924-1932: between private and public enterprise. (German Business History)
September 22, 1993... 91 DRG, "Aufhebung des Reichsbahndirektion Magdeburg," Drucksache Nr. 530, 39. VR, DRG, 22-23 Sept. 1930, p. 3, BA NL 13/518, f. 395; Pnder, "Aufhebung der Reichsbahn-Direktionen in Mainz, Shwerin und Oldenburg," Rk. 8940, Berlin, March 1931, BA...

Die Textilindustrie in Calw und Heidenheim, 1750-1870: Eine regional vergleichende Untersuchung zur Geschichte der Fruhindustrialisierung und der Industriepolitik in Wurttemberg.
September 22, 1993... In recent decades, the characteristics of Wurttemberg's industrial development have been the subject of numerous studies, which have centered, for the most part, on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In different ways, all of them have...

Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy.
September 22, 1993... American economic historians should thank Cambridge University Press--and Harold James, who promoted the idea--for making this collection of important papers by the dean of German economic historians available in a competent English translation....

How Much is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States.
September 22, 1993... There are at least four ways in which price indexes are used to measure economic processes taking place over time. First, the index is a distillation of the general price level, the movements of which are a significant diagnostic of the...

Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835.
September 22, 1993... In Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, William J. Gilmore joins the select company of historians who have written an important book. And, like most important books, it can be read in a variety of ways. Readers interested in the underlying...

Cargill: Trading the World's Grain.
September 22, 1993... Cargill has long been a source of fascination for both historians and the business community. As the largest privately held company in the United States (according to Forbes)--and one of the most secretive--Cargill has stood beyond the critical...

Breweries of Wisconsin.
September 22, 1993... Jerry Apps, professor of adult and continuing education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has built up a considerable reputation as a writer of popular books on the history of Wisconsin. Here he turns his attention to brewing, identifying...

Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Essays.
September 22, 1993... During the last decade, a new group of labor law historians has emerged. Their focus is on the "new social history"--that is, they reject the economic determinism of Marxism but apply a class analysis to show how workers' ills could be cured with...

The Economic Structure of Corporate Law.
September 22, 1993... Over the past two decades, there has been an almost obsessive devotion among lawyers to working out the implications of Ronald Coase's 1937 article, the "Nature of the Firm." Henry Manne's writing during the 1960s initiated the project, and...

Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890-1930.
September 22, 1993... In many respects, this is an excellent and most welcome book. In it economic historian Price Fishback uses cliometric techniques--a combination of economic theory and statistics--to challenge the stereotypes that radical social historians have...

Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930.
September 22, 1993... Sharon Hartman Strom's book is an important contribution to the burgeoning field of the history of women and work that does indeed take the reader well beyond the typewriter. Strom tells, with great richness, detail, and nuance, the interrelated...

A New Deal for the American People.
September 22, 1993... Since 1963, William E. Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal has ruled the roost of one-volume analyses of that exciting, consequential era. Despite numerous changes during the past three decades in historians' interpretations of...

Automobile Workers and the American Dream, 2d ed.
September 22, 1993... In 1946 the sociologist Ely Chinoy began a series of interviews with auto workers at the Oldsmobile plant in Lansing, Michigan, in order to gauge attitudes toward work and career prospects. By 1947 he had interviewed sixty-two workers, several...

Administering the Taylor Law: Public Employee Relations in New York.
September 22, 1993... The last two decades have been particularly grim for the American labor movement. Unions have shrunk in membership and declined in power. The only bright spot has been the public sector, particularly at the state level. Yet there has been...

The Rise and Decline of U.S. Merchant Shipping in the Twentieth Century.
September 22, 1993... This is the first full-length historical survey of the development of U.S. merchant shipping since 1900. In defining the scope of his study, Rene De La Pedraja recognizes the importance of coastal and inland shipping, but he focuses mainly on...

Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography: The Airline Industry.
September 22, 1993... The Airline Industry is the latest volume in the Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography. This monumental collection of biographical and business sketches spans the evolution of the commercial aviation industry in the United...

The Boeing 247: The First Modern Airliner.
September 22, 1993... The airline industry is an excellent example of a twentieth-century business that has been heavily dependent on advanced technology and a favorable regulatory environment for its economic well-being. In this book, F. Robert van der Linden places...

The Politics of Aircraft: Building an American Military Industry.
September 22, 1993... This work describes a period between the two world wars when Congress dictated terms to aircraft makers, determining the size of the market by appropriating funds in amounts it deemed necessary and apportioning contracts in ways intended to...

The Engineer in America: A Historical Anthology from 'Technology and Culture.'
September 22, 1993... The Society for the History of Technology was established in America in 1958 and immediately began publication of a journal, Technology and Culture. Under its successive editors, Melvin Kranzberg and Robert C. Post, this quarterly has come to be...

Managing the Medical Arms Race: Innovation and Public Policy in the Medical Device Industry.
September 22, 1993... In this book, Susan Bartlett Foote has undertaken a daunting task: analyzing all of the public policies that have shaped the current environment for innovation and marketing of medical devices in the United States, and pointing out potential...

Electrifying Eden: Portland General Electric, 1889-1965.
September 22, 1993... For many years, the electric power industry was a fertile field for the practice of corporate history. More recently, however, the utilities seemed less inclined to commission such endeavors, and business history as a discipline steered away from...

Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States.
September 22, 1993... Douglas Gomery, a professor of cinema at the University of Maryland, has written an important book that provides a useful systematic historical overview of how films have been exhibited in America from the pre-Nickelodeon era to the contemporary...

Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime.
September 22, 1993... From the beginning of baseball, the owners have simulated the sound of a Greek chorus wailing of impending economic doom. It would seem that baseball owners have seldom turned a profit and certainly will never record another one. It was always...

Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy.
September 22, 1993... Mainstream economists have never taken seriously Joseph Schumpeter's argument that capitalism has been transformed from an individualist entrepreneurial to a managerialist corporate system. They prefer to think and theorize about a more or less...

Losing Time: The Industrial Policy Debate.
September 22, 1993... Otis Graham should be complimented for his timing: the industrial policy debate, once considered over only a few years ago, has been brought back into the political arena with the arrival of the Democrats in the White House in 1993. Who could...

Dismantling the Cold War Economy.
September 22, 1993... This book should be required reading for policymakers, business people, and consumers, as calls for an industrial policy grow louder on all sides. The notion that government should help the industries and technologies of the future--derided by...

Industrial Efficiency of Six Nations.
September 22, 1993... It is well known that the average level of productivity in an industry differs widely among countries. It is unclear, however, whether these variances result from a gap between the best-practice firms in each country or from a long tail of less...

Entrepot Capitalism: Foreign Investment and the American Dream in the Twentieth Century.
September 22, 1993... Charles Geisst's brief survey seeks to trace the history of the "American Dream" (freedom from want, access to higher education, home ownership, wealth) from the First World War to the present in an "international context," by which he means as...

Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England.
September 22, 1993... Sonya Rose has produced an overview of the construction and changes in the division of labor in nineteenth-century England that provides a useful summary of the debates in historical sociology, which began at the time with reports of factory...

Les Deux reves du Commerce: Enterprise et Institution dans la Region Lilloise: 1780-1860.
September 22, 1993... Jean-Pierre Hirsch's Les Deux Reves du Commerce is an exhaustively researched and convincingly argued study of business in the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing area from the decade before the French Revolution until the 1860 trade treaty between France...

Les Patrons du Second Empire, 3 vols.
September 22, 1993... The three volumes published so far in what resembles a regional Dictionary of Business Biography underline the commitment of French historians to the study of entrepreneurship. Whereas the British agenda for research into business history largely...

Tussen Reich en Empire: De Economische Betrekkingen van Nederland met Zijn Belangrijkste Handelspartners: Duitsland, Groot-Brittannie en Belgie en de Nederlandse Handelspolitiek, 1929-1936.
September 22, 1993... This book was submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the Free University of Amsterdam in 1990. It deals with the economic relationship between the Netherlands and its three main trading partners (Germany, Great Britain, and Belgium) at the time...

The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century.
September 22, 1993... In their introductory essay, the editors David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans state that German scholars have largely neglected the middle class in their study of German social history. This statement surely does not reflect the latest in the...

Vom Stadtwerk zum Elektrizitatsgrobunternehmen: Grundung, Aufbau und Ausbau der "Rheinisch-Westfalischen Elektrizitatswerk AG" (RWE), 1898-1918.
September 22, 1993... The Rheiniseh-Westfalischen Elektrizitatswerk (RWE) was just another municipal central station when it was founded in 1898 by the city of Essen and an electrical manufacturing company, Elektrizittats-AG vorm. W. Lahmeyer & Co. Unlike many...

Wege und Wegmarken: 100 Jahre Thyssen.
September 22, 1993... One of the most important corporations in twentieth-century German history is Thyssen, with its empire extending from coal all the way to finished machine tools. In the centennial anniversary of its founding, the firm commissioned this book from...

The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System.
September 22, 1993... Until the onset of perestroika, Western assessments of the economy of the USSR largely adopted the preoccupations of their subject: the heavy industrial-military sector; the feasibility of long-term economic performance predicated on deferred...

Restructuring the Soviet Economy.
September 22, 1993... In this study, David Dyker asks a number of significant questions concerning the possibility of successfully revamping the Soviet economic system and revitalizing the country's economy. After outlining the major historical factors behind the...

Japanese Business Abroad in Historical Perspective: Foreign Direct Investment of Japanese Cotton-Spinning Firms in China Before World War I.
September 22, 1993... This book focuses on the histories of thirteen Japanese cotton-spinning firms as an initial foreign direct investment industry in Japan. The book contains three major points of interest. First, the author carefully analyzes the...