While researchers have pointed to numerous methods of expanding state capacity in the Progressive Era, the literature has overlooked the creation of nominally private companies relying on implicit government guarantees, later known as government-sponsored enterprises. This article explains the novelty and structure of the nation's first such enterprises, the Federal Land Banks, and describes how their design embodied several fragilities that contributed to their collapse and bailout in 1932. The article then demonstrates why, despite these problems, the land banks became the model for subsequent enterprises and financial reforms.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) became an important subject among business leaders during the post–World War II era. Business leaders often used the idea of CSR to explain actions they took to prevent additional government involvement in their industry. They argued that because they were behaving in a socially responsible manner, further federal programming was unnecessary. The cases of health insurance and home mortgages demonstrate how this political approach frequently required business leaders to alter their profitmaking strategies in order to substantiate their argument before the public. Thus, the history of corporate social responsibility is critical for understanding a hidden facet of American political development.

The managerial revolution drove the rise of business schools in the United States and business schools contributed by graduating professional managers. Before World War II, however, the effect of an MBA degree was modest, causing great concern to leading business schools. Harvard Business School—in order to increase this impact—began in the mid-1920s to develop nondegree programs for potential top executives. In 1945, by drawing on the experiences of certain short-lived programs and the extraordinary situation during the war, Harvard Business School launched its Advanced Management Program, which became a global role model for executive education.

This paper updates an earlier article published in Business History Review that concluded that by the second half of the 1990s, there had been a profusion of new, purportedly practical ideas about strategy, many of which embodied some explicit dynamics. This update provides several indications of a drop-off since then in the rate of development of new ideas about strategy but also a continued focus, in the new ideas that are being developed, on dynamics. And since our stock of dynamic frameworks has, based on one enumeration, more than doubled in the last fifteen to twenty years, updating expands both the need and the empirical basis for some generalizations about the types of dynamic strategy frameworks—and strategy frameworks in general—that managers are likely to find helpful versus those that they are not.

The Cambridge History of Capitalism, a formidable compendium of thirty-four essays spread over two volumes (each well over five hundred pages in length), was first conceived by the economic historians Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson in 2005. At that time, the “history of capitalism” was not yet a term of art in history departments; even in graduate workshops at Harvard, the locus classicus of the later movement, “political economy” was still the preferred phrase. By the time the book was published in 2014, much had changed: Harvard now offered a program on the “study of capitalism,” Cornell was convening a summer boot camp on the “history of capitalism,” Columbia had a book series on the history of “U.S. capitalism,” the Journal of American History had assembled a roundtable on the theme, and the front page of the New York Times had taken notice. Questions that long seemed the province of other disciplines had come to the forefront in history departments.