In reconstructing the early business history of black America, Professor Walker emphasizes the diversity and complexity of antebellum black entrepreneurship, both slave and free. With few exceptions, prevailing historical assessments have confined their analyses of pre-Civil War black business participation to marginal enterprises, concentrated primarily in craft and service industries. In America's preindustrial mercantile business community, however, blacks established a wide variety of enterprises, some of them remarkably successful. The business activities of antebellum blacks not only offer insights into the multiplicity of responses to the constraints of racism and slavery, but also highlight relatively unexplored areas in the historical development of the free enterprise system in the United States.

China has produced wine from grapes since the second century, B.C., but interest in Western wines did not begin until the late nineteenth century. Professor Godley describes the origins of the modern industry, which he traces back to an overseas Chinese entrepreneur from Southeast Asia who, despite the obvious advantages held by foreign competitors, began the construction of the country's first modern winery in 1892. One of the more unusual capitalist ventures in the late Qing and early Republican periods, the company ran into financial difficulties, but not before it had established a precedent for what is now a rapidly expanding business. Although the vicissitudes of the grape wine industry illustrate some important points about modern Chinese economic development, the author offers this case study in business history as something of an allegory: wine as a symbol for the meeting of East and West, yesterday and today.

As one of the leaders among American toy manufacturers, Selchow & Righter Company, makers of crossword and trivia games, represents one pattern of development in the toy industry. In this essay, Professor Petrik describes Selchow & Righter's progress from jobber to manufacturer, showing how the families of the company's name built the business on the strength of products developed outside the company, on the assiduous protection of trademarks, and on conservative management aimed at preserving the company for the “corporate family.” Selchow it Righter's chronicle reflects themes present in the toy industry and, especially, epitomizes those associated with companies that elected to retain family control.

In this article Projessor Miranti contrasts the differing reactions of leaders in the public accounting profession to the structure of national economic regulation that emerged in America during the first decades of the twentieth century. Specifically, he focuses on the actions taken by two national professional organizations, the American Association of Public Accountants and its successor, the American Institute of Accountants, at two important junctures in the history of financial reform: the establishment of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Trade Commission and the organization of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In assessing these experiences, his article concentrates on identifying the changing circumstances and political contexts that gave rise first to an associationalist response and then to a statist response to the problem of ordering the nation's financial markets.

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History offers rich opportunities for business historians. In this essay, Mr. Fleckner and Mr. Crew describe the holdings and facilities of the recently established Archives Center and examine in detail the museum's extensive and extremely valuable holdings in advertising history.