The major challenge to historians today is the same whether one's research lies in business history or general history. It is to focus the rapidly growing social knowledge of the mid-twentieth century upon historical materials and to do this mainly by asking new questions of the records, questions that will make history an analytic as well as a descriptive discipline.

The historian of business is peculiarly well placed to meet this challenge. He works with the human element in an area that heretofore has been the concern of the oldest, most complex, and least humanistic social theory, economics. That is, by the nature of his materials the historian of business is forced to seek a reconciliation between actual human behavior and the implications of rigorous economic analysis. A similar challenge is offered in harnessing each of the other social sciences to the business historian's task. In so far as he succeeds in remolding these analytical disciplines to fit reality in the sphere of business, he solves the major problems of all historians and all social scientists.

The over-all challenge to research in business history is to provide facts and generalizations concerning the history of business which may lead to a better understanding of business itself and of its rôle in society. This is an urgent challenge in our age of revolution, a revolution in which the generally expressed objective is a better and more secure living, the political tool being largely economic class conflict, and the target, private capitalism.

Both Disraeli and Walter Leaf are credited with having said that there are three things that drive men to madness: love, ambition, and the study of currency problems. Regardless of the origin of the quotation, both men were happily innocent of the vast potentialities inherent in teaching business history. For teaching business history is a chain of problems. And problems and challenges are synonymous. To cite a few: What shall be the purpose of teaching business history? Shall the subject be presented by the case method or in a less specific and more abstract way? Having answered these problems more or less to his own satisfaction, the instructor is then confronted with the ubiquitous problem of defining the entrepreneur. And he is constantly plagued by the incidental problems of overcoming the amorphous nature of the subject, not to speak of the monumental tasks of correcting the preconceived and fallacious notions of the student and overcoming the vast mass of misleading and misinformed interpretations that parade under the name business history. But these are the inevitable problems in the teaching of business history.

Business history, as distinct from economic history, is now being taught on the freshman, senior, and graduate levels in a number of colleges and universities. I am to speak only on the problems and challenges of teaching business history on the freshman level, but in this connection I shall mention the desirability of courses for senior and graduate students.

Business history as a differentiated subject is of comparatively recent origin in the American academic scene. It has naturally been most closely associated with collegiate schools of business, and particularly with those offering graduate or semi-graduate programs of instruction. It now seems appropriate to inquire what rôle it plays in such programs, what should be its content, how it should be presented, and what relationship it has to the closely associated fields of economic history, economics, business administration, and public administration