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Editor's Note

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Walter A. Friedman
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Information
Business History Review , Volume 82 , Issue 4: A Special Issue on Salesmanship , Winter 2008 , pp. 665 - 670
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Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2008

References

1 Historians interested in the field of marketing would benefit enormously from reading the Journal of Marketing (founded in 1936); the Journal of Marketing Research (founded in 1964); Industrial Marketing Management (founded in 1971); and Marketing Science (founded in 1982).

2 See, for instance, Pope, Daniel, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Corley, T. A. B., “Consumer Marketing in Britain, 1914–60,” Business History 29, no. 4 (1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strasser, Susan, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Tedlow, Richard S., New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Tedlow, Richard S. and Jones, Geoffrey, eds., The Rise and Fall of Mass Marketing (London, 1993)Google Scholar; Jones, Geoffrey and Morgan, Nicholas, eds., Adding Value: Brands and Marketing in Food and Drink (London, 1994)Google Scholar; Lears, T. J.Jackson, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Frank, Thomas, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Subculture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laird, Pamela Walker, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore, Md., 1998)Google Scholar; Strasser, Susan, McGovern, Charles, and Judt, Matthias, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harp, Stephen L., Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore, Md., 2001)Google Scholar; Godley, Andrew and Church, Roy, eds., The Emergence of Modern Marketing (London, 2003)Google Scholar; Gudis, Catherine, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Berghoff, Hartmut, ed., Marketinggeschichte: Die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik (Frankfurt, 2007)Google Scholar; and Fitzgerald, Robert, “ Marketing and Distribution,” in Oxford Handbook of Business History, ed. Jones, Geoffrey and Zeitlin, Jonathan (New York, 2008).Google Scholar

3 There are some important exceptions. See, for instance, Young's, James HarveyToadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton, N.J., 1961)Google Scholar, which describes the way patent-medicine salesmen developed techniques to brand their concoctions that were similar to those later used in other industries. Also fascinating is Harris's, NeilHumbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston, 1973)Google Scholar, which describes Barnum's effective, sometimes scandalous, methods of publicity.

4 The form “peddler” is common in the U.S., and “pedlar” in the U.K., but both forms are acceptable in the two countries.

5 Fontaine, Laurence, A History of Pedlars in Europe (Durham, N.C., 1996), 73.Google Scholar

6 Jaffee's, David “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760–1860,” Journal of American History 78 (Sept. 1991): 511–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olegario, Rowena, “‘That Mysterious People’: Jewish Merchants, Transparency, and Community in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Business History Review 73 (Summer 1999): 161–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Strasser, Susan, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, 1999)Google Scholar for a description of the peddler as an essential part of recycling and reusing in early America; and Rainer, Joseph, “The Honorable Fraternity of Moving Merchants: Yankee Peddlers in the Old South, 1800–1860” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2000)Google Scholar.

7 For book agents, see the introduction by Arbour, Keith, in Arbour, , ed., Canvassing Books, Sample Books, and Subscription Publishers' Ephemera, 1833–1951 in the Collection of Michael Zinman (Ardsley, New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Berghoff, Hartmut, then at the University of Goettingen and now at the German Historical Institute, published “Marketing Diversity: The Making of a Global Consumer Product: Hohner's Harmonicas, 1857–1930,” Enterprise and Society 2 (2001): 338–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Biggart, Nicole Woolsey, Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling Or ganizations in America (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar; Clarke, Alison J., Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Washington, D.C., 1999)Google Scholar; Manko, Katina Lee, “‘Ding Dong! Avon Calling!’ Gender, Business and Door-to-Door Selling, 1890–1955” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2001)Google Scholar; Lyon-Jenness, Cheryl, “Planting a Seed: The Nineteenth-Century Horticultural Boom in America,” Business History Review 78 (Autumn 2004): 381–421CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murphy, Sharon, “Selecting Risks in an Anonymous World: The Agency System for Life Insurance in Antebellum America,” Business History Review 82 (Spring 2008): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kealing, Bob, Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper, and the Home Party Pioneers (Gainesville, Fla., 2008).Google Scholar

8 See Allen, A. P., The Ambassadors of Commerce (London, 1885).Google Scholar

9 Commercial traveling was an occupation that defined itself as being “manly” and, indeed, was almost entirely filled by men; according to the 1890 census, 99 percent of those in the profession were male and nearly all (85 percent) were native-born. In contrast, the number of foreign-born among the census's category “hucksters and peddlers” was much higher (53 percent in 1890). Edwards, A. M., Population: Comparative Occupational Statistics for the United States, 1870 to 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943)Google Scholar; Biggart, Charismatic Capitalism, 28–29.

10 See also Strasser, Susan “The Smile that Pays: The Culture of Traveling Salesmen, 1880–1920,” in Gilbert, James B. et al., eds., The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture (Belmont, Ca., 1992).Google Scholar

11 For Great Britain, see French, Michael, “Commercials, Careers, and Culture: Travelling Salesmen in Britain, 1890–19305,” Economic History Review 58, no. 2 (2005): 352–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Popp, Andrew, “Building the Market: John Shaw of Wolverhampton and Commercial Travelling in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Business History 49, no. 3 (2007): 321–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Friedman, Walter A., Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).Google Scholar Only in the U.S., for instance, did you get both iconic sales forces at places like NCR and IBM and highly influential works like Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922) and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949). Both “Babbit” and “Willy Loman” have entered the American lexicon.

13 See Davies, Robert Bruce, Peacefully Working to Conquer the World: Singer Sewing Machines in Foreign Markets, 1854–1920 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Fred V. Carstensen, American Enterprise in Foreign Markets: Studies of Singer and International Harvester in Imperial Russia (1984); Godley, Andrew, “Selling the Sewing Machine around the World: Singer's International Marketing Strategies, 1850–1920,” Enterprise & Society 7, no. 2 (2006): 266–314Google Scholar; Church, Roy, “Salesmen and the Transformation of Selling in Britain and the US in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Economic History Review 61, no. 3 (2008): 695–725.CrossRefGoogle Scholar There is also a fine literature on department-store selling. See Leach, William, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Benson, Susan Porter, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, Ill., 1986)Google Scholar; and Abelson, Elaine S., When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1989).Google Scholar

14 On Schumpeter, see McCraw, Thomas K., Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).Google Scholar

15 See Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie (New York, 1900)Google Scholar; Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt (New York, 1922)Google Scholar; Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman (New York, 1949)Google Scholar; Welty's, Eudora story “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (New York, 1941)Google Scholar; Heller's, Joseph book Something Happened (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; and Mamet's, DavidGlengarry Glen Ross (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

16 On the shrewd trader, see Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, The Clockmaker, or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville (1837; edition used, Toronto, 2007).Google Scholar

17 On the image of the salesman in U.S. fiction, see Spears, , 100 Years on the Road, prefaceGoogle Scholar, and Friedman, , Birth of a Salesman, pp. 29, 191–92, 249–50.Google Scholar