Will the lack of hard data forever preclude firm conclusions about the impact of industrialization upon antebellum America? Whether it does or not, it seems unlikely to prevent continuation of one of the liveliest debates in American economic history. Professors Vedder and Gallaway contribute their findings to the controversy, and conclude that the rate of profit on manufacturing capital before 1860 was much lower than recent work has suggested.

While events of major significance for banking occurred on the national scene in the populist and progressive years, noteworthy changes also materialized on the state level. Like their brethren elsewhere in the country, California bankers struggled through their organizations with such problems as how to achieve “sound banking,” how to influence the political process in their state, and how to give banking more of the trappings of professionalism.

The House of Brown was a major international banking firm during the nineteenth century. The leading banking houses such as Baring Brothers and the Browns facilitated the flow of goods throughout the world by providing a range of services vital to international commerce. Mr. Perkins examines the manner in which the firm did business in a large American port on the eve of the Civil War.

Robert Livingston's career provides the first opportunity to consider in detail the emergence of an early New York businessman. Trained in business in Rotterdam, he brought to the New World the experience, knowledge, and techniques of one of the most advanced commercial centers of his day. On the Albany frontier he applied the Old World's business methods to advantage and gradually emerged as a dominant figure in colonial New York. His records and business correspondence leave no doubt that Livingston belonged to that class of businessmen often referred to as sedentary or resident merchants, though he did not employ as many agents and partners as his later, more mature counterparts. Neither did he engage in as many ventures or perform as many functions as the Browns, Hancocks, and other late eighteenth-century merchants, nor did he create an impressive business organization at home or abroad as was customary among certain European contemporaries. Still, as a wholesaler and retailer, importer and exporter, shipowner and land speculator, Livingston was an early New York practitioner of diversified business functions and investments. His extensive land dealings, no doubt motivated in part by the social prestige attached to real estate, were undertaken primarily as a source of credit and revenue. Livingston Manor was operated as a business enterprise: some of it was cultivated on Livingston's behalf, parts were leased to tenants who provided for the Lord of the Manor not only rents but a steady market for the goods he obtained in overseas trading ventures, and other sections were devoted to various manufacturing enterprises. Livingston's political life was an integral and necessary part of his business ventures, which reflected at all points the total instability of most colonial institutions. From the details of Livingstons many-sided commercial life emerges a rare picture of an embryonic business society in which the means were sorely taxed to achieve the ends conceived by ambitious men.

Despite Louis Brandeis' well-publicized opposition to the New Haven-Boston & Maine railroad merger of 1907–1909, a large number of public-spirited men, including many progressive reform leaders whom Brandeis had worked with and admired, favored the combination. They saw the merger not as a conspiracy against the public interest, but a necessary response in the public interest to a commercial crisis in Massachusetts. This examination of their reasoning and action tempers Brandeis' widely accepted assessment of the controversy.

Substantial gains made within the past score years in clarifying the nature and scope of business history afford ample grounds for confidence that this academic youngster will assuredly develop into a vigorous adult. Such high optimism can be sustained, however, only if this small guild of practitioners develops and administers appropriate intellectual booster shots necessary for its continued health. At the moment it does appear that business history is vulnerable to a large number of afflictions. To put the matter more specifically, business historians as a group give the impression of being sharply divided on issues where agreement might reasonably be expected at this stage of the field's development. Signs of a recent shift from emphasis on decision-making, innovation, and administration to a stress on a vaguely defined “general environment” fueled concern.

The lengthy dispute about the role of big business in Hitler's Third Reich has generally portrayed business leaders either as instigators or as victims. The experience of Norton Company, an American multinational in Germany between 1933 and 1945, fits neither role. In this article, Professor Cheape demonstrates that Norton's German and American managers acted as outsiders compelled to play a part for their firm's long–run self–interest. As a result, Norton executives variously cooperated with, ignored, or violated Nazi policies, presenting a richer and more complex pattern of behavior than is usually pictured.

Canadian lines that were spreading out over what would become the Province of Ontario looked forward, in the years before the American Civil War, to becoming important east-west carriers between the rapidly growing American cities of the eastern seaboard and the still-new cities of the American Midwest. Canada's small population and undeveloped industry would force her railroads to rely heavily on traffic going from one American city to another. Lines like the Grand Trunk and the Great Western struggled desperately therefore, to avoid American financial control. With the help of British capital, they succeeded. But America's contribution to Canadian railroading ran much deeper than money. Dominating the skilled engineers and experienced construction contractors who came from south of the border was more difficult for Canadian directors to manage. In the end, however, it was the early failure of top Canadian management to bury their rivalries, ignore their English creditors, emulate Americans like Vanderbilt, Thomson, and Garrett, and consolidate into an integrated line between New England, the Middle Atlantic seaboard, and the Midwest that doomed their railroads to becoming, as one Canadian put it, “side streets to the trade thoroughfare.”

One of the most neglected aspects of the celebrated Teapot Dome investigation is the reaction of businessmen in general to these events. This article analyzes the views of the business community to Teapot Dome and reveals how various business interests reacted to the episode.

This article addresses the question of how standards were determined and disseminated in an era before the formation of agreed upon standards or the existence of governing bodies, by examining the case of nineteenth-century Brazil. It argues that the experience in Brazil was similar to that of other nations: individuals engaged in mathematical, scientific, engineering, and statistical organizations created networks of professional societies, intertwined with international diplomacy and domestic legislators, to promote the adoption of the metric system. It analyzes the process from idea to advocacy culminating in national implementation on the eve of the 1875 International Convention of the Meter, to which Brazil was signatory.

General Motors (GM) became the world's dominant automaker in the 1920s and 1930s thanks in part to a dynamic, centralized public relations operation. The intended audience of this marketing included GM's own overseas employees. As the company opened new plants in foreign countries, it used media such as General Motors World, an employee newspaper, to communicate that it understood the needs of different foreign consumers and to advocate against protectionist economic policies that hindered its ability to sell cars. The messages of General Motors World shaped global perceptions of GM's corporate structure and brand, and were a core element of the automaker's overseas activity.

American broadcasting, unique among media industries, relied on sponsors and their ad agencies for program content from the 1920s through the 1950s. Some sponsors broadcast educational or culturally uplifting programs to burnish their corporate images. By the mid-1960s, however, commercial broadcasting had transformed, and advertisers could only buy interstitial minutes for interrupting commercials, during which they wooed cynical consumers with entertaining soft-sell appeals. The midcentury shifts in institutional power in US broadcasting among corporate sponsors, advertising agencies, and radio/television networks reflected a fundamental shift in beliefs about how to use broadcasting as an advertising medium.

Like many other American corporations, Intel was outcompeted in manufacturing by Japanese firms in the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. By 1985, it became clear that the corporation's weakness in production endangered its long-term survival. Responding to the Japanese challenge, Intel's upper management instigated a fundamental reform of manufacturing. At their behest, production engineers and managers adopted Japanese manufacturing technologies and operating procedures. They put microchip fabrication on a scientific footing. They developed new ways of transferring processes from development to production and standardized the firm's factories. This major transformation enabled Intel to reach manufacturing parity with Japanese chipmakers by the early 1990s.

In the late 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled the bubble policy as a central part of Jimmy Carter's plan to reform environmental regulations that many believed had grown too proscriptive and too costly for American industry. Since the EPA's formation, regulators had dictated method and means for reducing air pollution. The bubble returned the prerogative to business. But despite bipartisan support, the bubble never took off. Drawing on EPA records and interviews, this article shows how skeptical regulators intentionally made the bubble unwieldy, driving away businesses wary of uncertainty. Though Ronald Reagan's election seemed to lift the bubble's fortunes, his undiscerning assault on the administrative state ironically deflated the EPA's development of a viable alternative to the proscriptive model.