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  • Major Problems in American Business History: Documents and Essays
  • Glenn E. Bugos (bio)
Major Problems in American Business History: Documents and Essays. Edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Philip B. Scranton . New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Pp xix+521. $55.56.

This is a remarkable introduction to the discipline of business history. The introductory essay by Philip Scranton on "Why Study Business History?" alone makes it worth picking up. Scranton's essay, like the book, deftly weaves insights into how business permeates every facet of American culture, displays the richness in original sources, and convinces the reader that business has been utterly personal. [End Page 907]

This book traces the major shifts in American business over four hundred years, from the colonial to the global, from agriculture to manufacturing to service. It covers the challenging topics, like slavery and depression, and recurring ones, like the role of government in business. What makes the work so valuable, though, is its sustained ability to show how business is ultimately an individual endeavor, whether a person is actively engaged in a firm or living life as a consumer. "It focuses on the lives of people doing business," the editors state in their introduction, "on their hopes, dreams, decisions and struggles. It assumes that a variety of experience is valuable, and that we can learn something from shopkeepers, plantation owners, factory managers, and big business executives" (p. xvi).

This is a reader, not a textbook. It follows a formula that has worked well for Houghton Mifflin's Major Problems series, and what it lacks in coverage it makes up for in texture. Editors' essays introduce, in this case, fifteen general topics and summarize the readings. Within each "problem" chapter there are about eight contemporaneous readings. Maybe half are newspaper articles reflecting the times, and half are letters or broadsides written by someone grappling or someone trying to persuade. These are followed by about four analytical essays drawn from widely cited journal articles, all followed by short, simple lists of further readings. The only original pieces are by coeditors Scranton and Reggie Blaszczyk. Unfortunately, citations have been stripped from the essays. Fortunately, reading is brisk, with great diversity in tone and ellipses clearing ostensibly boring parts in the originals.

Note that this book is meant for advanced undergraduates, in that students should already know the basics of American business history. Rather than conveying chronology or causality, the introductory essays largely list terms students should already be familiar with. Because technology plays a central role in many of the readings, the volume might be useful in a history of technology class to introduce students to issues in business history. It is already finding an audience. Despite a hefty price tag, in the two years since this book has been released, it has been widely adopted in courses on American economic history. Only Mansel Blackford's Business Enterprise in American History (1986) addresses the same audience.

While other books in this series tend to define "problems" as areas of historiographical controversy, Blaszczyk and Scranton define their chapters as topics where other American historians turn to business historians for answers. There is relatively little firm history, and more from the cultural turn. Reprinted here are essays by Alfred Chandler, Mary Yeager, Edwin Perkins, Naomi Lamoreaux, Pamela Laird, JoAnne Yates, Steven Usselman, Kenneth Lipartito, Colleen Dunlavy, Rowena Olegario, Angel Kwolleck-Foland, David Sicilia, Mansel Blackford, Richard Vietor, Geoffrey Jones, and twenty others. Together these represent a concise introduction to the state of the literature in business history. [End Page 908]

But again it is the first-person narrative, and thus the personal tone, which makes this such a compelling read. John Wanamaker, Sam Walton, and Ray Kroc each describe how they built their empires. Colonial ironworkers plead for the legislature to review water rights. A Georgia plantation owner in 1836 instructs his overseer on what matters. Reprints of credit reports from the 1880s, including one of a widowed dry goods purveyor, bring an unsettlingly quaint tone to the very serious need for surveillance in a credit-driven American culture. A railroad executive in 1903 describes his as a manly profession. An advertising executive in 1924 describes how...

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