Editor's Introduction

From May 19 to May 21, 2005, the Business History Conference held its annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The program committee of Steven W. Usselman (chair), Tracey Deutsch, Helen Shapiro, Steven Tolliday, and JoAnne Yates put together a marvelous program. The local arrangements committee, George Greene (chair), Tracey Deutsch, Jim Fogerty, and Anne Green, assured everyone of an enjoyable and well-run event. Special thanks go to the following sponsors of the meeting: the James J. Hill Library; Johns Hopkins University Press; Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, Hagley Museum and Library; MIT Sloan School of Management; Minnesota Historical Society; the General Mills Foundation; Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota; History Department, University of Minnesota; Oxford University Press; and the Winthrop Group. Finally, we are grateful to the Newcomen Society for its sponsorship of travel grants and the doctoral colloquium.

The 2005 conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, June 8–10, 2006. Please visit the Business History Conference Web site for more information (http://www.h-net.org/~business/bhcweb/).

Highlights of the 2005 meeting included a number of distinguished awards for scholarship in the field. Thomas A. Kinney, The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States: 1914–1945 (Harvard University Press) shared the Hagley Prize for the best book in business history. Dalit Baranoff, "Shaped by Risk: The American Fire Insurance Industry, 1790–1920" (Johns Hopkins University, 2003) and Anna Spadavecchia, "State Subsidies and the Sources of Company Finance in Italian Industrial Districts, 1951–1991" (University of London, 2005) shared the Herman E. Krooss Prize for the best dissertation in business history. Summaries of both dissertations, along with those of the others presented at the conference, appear in this issue.

The Newcomen Prize for the best article published in Enterprise & Society in 2004 went to Emanuela Scarpellini, "Shopping American-Style: The Arrival of the Supermarket in Postwar Italy," which appeared in the December issue. Finally, the K. Austin Kerr Prize for the best first paper presented at a Business History Conference annual meeting was awarded to Sharon Ann Murphy, University of Virginia, "Protecting Middle-Class Families: Life Insurance in Antebellum America."

Normally in this issue readers would see the Presidential Address, given in 2005 by JoAnne Yates. This year we are doing something different. The address will form the basis of a symposium to be held at the Hagley Museum and Library on March 10, 2006. Further details can be found in the announcement in this issue. The proceedings of this conference will appear in the June 2006 issue.

I would like to acknowledge the tremendous contributions of my coworkers here at Florida International University, coordinating editor Elisabeth O'Kane and editorial assistant Chris Calvo. Their work has been vital to the assuring the high quality and timely production of this journal. We continue to be grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Business Administration at Florida International University for their support. My thanks to the associate editors of the journal, our editorial board, to the staff at Oxford University Press, and to all of you who have generously given your time to review manuscripts and contribute book reviews.