Utilizing data from a single state, Professor Keehn examines a number of important hypotheses about banking history and the role of banking in the process of economic growth and development in America from the Civil War to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

Focusing on developments of the last twenty years, the author analyzes the achievements and the shortcomings of business history in Germany and offers some suggestions for its future.

Arguing that the American bituminous coal industry suffered from “excessive competition,” this study traces the industry's repeated failures to control output or prices, whether by various kinds of trade associations, mergers, or by attempts to secure government sanctions for cooperation. Although an over-zealous Department of Justice must bear some responsibility for the industry's “sick” condition, Professor Graebner concludes, the fundamental problem lay in the basic economic conditions in the industry.

At the end of World War II, by far the most significant pressure for integrating the aviation industry into national defense planning came neither from the major aircraft firms nor from the military. Instead, the Truman administration played the leading role in forging an important link in what later came to be called the “military-industrial complex.” Smaller businessmen and local politicians proved constant and eager supporters of that policy.

Professor Filante examines data on the patterns of trade and revenues on the Erie Canal during its first thirty-five years of operation.

This paper will take the following form:

a) a brief discussion of Erie Canal operations in the period 1825–1835, when neither rails nor other canals were competitors.

b) a discussion of the period 1835–1860 with specific attention turned to the sources and destinations of freight shipments, the composition of those shipments, and changes in the canal itself.

c) a discussion of rail-canal competition centering on the division of the market between the two along value of product and length of shipment criteria.