Re-emerging from the disruption caused by the Revolution and the War of 1812, the American whaling industry grew to dominate the seas between 1820 and 1860, only to suffer a severe decline during and after the Civil War. In the following article, Professors Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins examine the hypothesis that the U.S. whaling industry collapsed because the stock of whales was being depleted. After investigating the size of the original whale populations, their breeding habits, and the estimates of whales taken during the nineteenth century, the authors conclude that the overfishing of whales of various species occurred either not at all or too late to have been a contributing factor in America's whaling decline.

Historians of Progressive Era conservation measures have focused on the efforts of government resource experts to free environmental management decisions from special-interest groups. Professor Judd argues that this emphasis has obscured the importance of economic factions in securing conservation legislation reflecting their various interests. His examination of Maine's ongoing efforts to manage its lobster industry demonstrates that scientific conservation codes received legislative sanction only when they could be made to conform to the commercial needs of the industry's competing groups.

An industry may fail to adopt or to extend new technology for many reasons other than lack of entrepreneurial vision. In the following article, Professor Newell considers the halting and incomplete diffusion of mechanization and continuous-process technology in the salmon-canning industry of the Pacific Northwest. She shows that the fragile and cyclical character of the natural resource, the labor system employed, and the remote and isolated locations of individual production units all affected cannery operators' decisions about technology adoption, and that the persistence of manual labor reflected rational, not reactionary, business choices.

In the following article, Professor Derickson examines the motivation for and the results of employee medical screening of workers in a midwestern mining community. He argues that, contrary to the goals of the associative state as envisioned by Herbert Hoover and others, government and mine operator efforts to determine the extent of respiratory disease among mine workers in the Tri-State were neither impelled by a concern for workers' welfare nor conducive to the amelioration of their problems.

Occasionally books appear that are broad enough in subject or methodology to afford scholars in various specialties a useful opportunity to look at the same material from different viewpoints. Like other documents, works of history tend to answer only those questions asked of them, and the juxtaposition of the questions important to readers of diverse scholarly backgrounds may be in itself illuminating. For this, the first in a continuing series of review colloquia, we invited a specialist in British population movements, a historical geographer, an economist who has done quantitative work in the field of colonial immigration, and an authority on the economy of British North America to consider Bernard Bailyn's Pulitzer Prize-winning study.