Drawing on corporate materials from the Banque de France, this article reveals a fact that is rarely raised in the study of foreign investment in France: among American investment in France, there are many cases in which French companies took the initiative in seeking American investment. Not all French companies were hostile to U.S. enterprises, even during the upsurge of French anti-Americanism, and the French Fifth Republic's restrictive policies toward American investment were not as rigorous as they might have appeared. Their major objective was to increase French competitiveness.

Professor Scott illustrates how railroads came to undertake the furtherance of agricultural education as a part of their business activities and, in some instances, pioneered projects that subsequently became widely copied models in the field.

In a sketch of the activities of a Genoese public notary of the late twelfth century, which appeared in this Bulletin some time ago, it was pointed out that his records included a considerable number of partnership contracts. Such contracts were almost always concluded for the purpose of trading overseas. As we know, the Genoese merchants of the twelfth century were chiefly engaged in the trade with North Africa, Romania (the Byzantine Empire), the Levant, and also Spain, southern France, Sicily, and Sardinia.

Merely by existing, the United States and the Western world as a whole bring to bear … a constant cultural pressure. But even though the idea of industrialization, expanded consumption, and political egalitarianism may pour forth equally for all … countries, what is absorbed varies widely from one to another. How and why and toward what ends each nation moves is conditioned by its own traditions and appreciations as well as by the historical course of its particular set of involvements with the industrially advanced nations.

Recent historians of the early twentieth century United States have called attention to the growing nationalization of American life, as well as to the importance of an eastern corporate elite in shaping foreign policy during that period. This study indicates the residual strength of the regional impulse and offers a counterweight to the national and eastern emphasis of those historians.

A leading archivist describes the nature and functions of professional records management and suggests some relationships between those activities and business history. If future historians are to have useful records for research, present-day scholars need to be informed about and interested in the work of records managers.