Editor's Introduction

Editorial transitions bring "legacies"—articles accepted or in process during the departing editor's term that appear in issues during the first phase of the new administration, alongside an increasing number of newly received essays. Consistent with this pattern, all but one contribution to Enterprise & Society's March 2008 issue were initially reviewed by Kenneth Lipartito and his associates; three of those in the June issue had similar origins. You will find a special section on historiography of American political economy in this issue and a group of research-intensive essays on business history in the Middle East will arrive in December. These projects likewise represent initiatives by the journal's prior editor and his colleagues, and the lion's share of the credit for them is theirs. Evidence of the incoming editors' interests and enthusiasms will begin to surface in Volume 10 (2009).

We open this quarter's issue with a set of tributes to and reflections on the legacy of Alfred Chandler, whose death last year the entire profession mourned. Mark Rose, our current Business History Conference president, provides an introduction, and six short essays follow, drafted by Mira Wilkins, Lou Galambos, Geoffrey Jones, Chris McKenna, your editor Philip Scranton, and Enterprise & Society's previous editor, Kenneth Lipartito. (Claiming editorial immunities, I attempted to wriggle out of this task, but could not manage to do so.) Mark Rose, also an associate editor of this journal, provided comments and took charge of stylistic editing, forwhich we all are grateful. These essays precede two articles on American issues: Aaron Marr's insightful reconstruction of railway development's intersections with multiple time consciousnesses in the antebellum South and Vicki Howard's relocation of consumption history's focus on metropolitan department stores to a mid-size city in upstate New York. We close with the special section mentioned above, three essays on U.S. political economy and business history, which descend from a roundtable at the American Historical Association's annual meeting. Introduced by Richard John, they include his reassessment of telecommunications, Robin Einhorn's repositioning of slavery analyses, and Jason Smith's reflections on the New Deal, particularly in relation to public works. My sense is that, in addition to their value for scholarship, these brief, assertive texts would work well as bases for class discussions. I hope you agree.

A modest change, which will become more evident once legacy projects are completed, is that I will undertake to hold off on future special issues for some time after our Middle East cluster this December. My sense is that business history has become substantially more diverse over the last few years and our editorial group aims to provide platforms to share that diversity with our readers, both in print and online. To accomplish this, we will not reserve large blocks of space for thematically linked collections. As the articles offered here suggest, we seek to feature work that pushes us to think critically about the central concepts and assumptions in business history, work that takes us to less traveled yet important places, and work that both derives from and will stimulate new questions for research. Should you be pursuing studies along these lines, do get in touch; the address is scranton@camden.rutgers.edu.