Although the growth of inexpensive, widely distributed magazines that began in the United States in the 1890s has been noted, the role played by magazines directed specifically toward female readers has received little scholarly attention. The following article examines contents, personnel, and readership and advertising, pricing, production, and distribution techniques to demonstrate that the women's magazines were pioneers in many of these areas.

As perhaps the first comprehensive historiographic and bibliographic essay on real estate history to be published, this essay casts a wide net, offering a review of the literature and suggestions for research opportunities in the many and varied streams of academic endeavor that flow into the new specialty of real estate history. Moving away from anecdotal personal and company biographies, the field is maturing and expanding toward more sophisticated and analytical studies that intersect a variety of disciplines. The exhaustive analysis of both traditional and innovative work provided in the text is complemented by a selected bibliography of the publications discussed in the article.

Reiterating and broadening a theme broached by its author over a decade ago, this article seeks to redirect the attention of business historians to the central role of the individual entrepreneur in American economic history. In both giant corporations and small start-up firms, in the late twentieth century and the early nineteenth, it argues, the presence—or absence—of intelligent, organized, and creative entrepreneurs has determined the success or failure of companies much more clearly than has the nature of their organizational charts.

The following article reexamines the role of business leaders in the structural reform of American city government during the Progressive Era. In presenting a careful analysis of the fate of redevelopment plans after Baltimore's great 1904 fire, this case study argues against an unsophisticated good guy/bad guy approach to urban and business history. Historians are urged, however, not to abandon attempts to make reasoned moral judgments concerning the consequences of structural reform, but rather to base those efforts on a recognition of the deepening complexity of twentieth-century urban society.

Operating in an economy that was still primarily export-import based and in a cultural environment suspicious of all business interests, members of Brazil's nineteenth-century business elite laced many obstacles to legitimizing their activities. Ironically, erforts to win acceptance tended to fragment business groups and eventually opened the way for a new industrial bourgeoisie at the expense of the overseas traders.

By examining the relationship between measurement and regulation at the Interstate Commerce Commission between 1887 and 1940, the following article sheds light on a little-studied component of the commission's work. It argues that the nature of the accounting and statistical tools used by the ICC had an impact on the regulatory process, specifically that the difficulties encountered in the development of accurate and relevant railroad statistics often undermined the agency's ability to achieve its regulatory goals. At the same time, a changing economic, political, and social environment affected the regulators' perception of the type of data necessary to gain control of the industry's structure.

This essay analyzes the changing configuration of black-owned businesses in the South over nearly a century. It divides the region into two sections—the Lower South and the Upper South—and examines changes that occurred prior to 1840, during the late antebellum era, and as a result of the Civil War. It uses a “wealth model” to define various business groups, and then creates business occupational categories based on the listings in various sources, including the U.S. censuses for 1850, 1860, and 1870. The article compares and contrasts the wealth holdings among various groups of blacks in business, and it analyzes, within a comparative framework, slave entrepreneurship, rural vs. urban business activity, color—black or mulatto—as a variable in business ownership, and slave ownership among blacks engaged in business.

Henry E. Huntington, according to the following article, placed his imprint on the development of his region, the Los Angeles basin, to an extent unique among urban entrepreneurs. His great wealth and foresight, and especially his interests in street railways, real estate development, and hydroelectric power, enabled him to become a de facto city planner for one of the most important metropolitan regions in the United States.

By examining the activities of the Bank of Nova Scotia, this article demonstrates that Canadian banks established branches in the Caribbean to finance trade with the United States rather than with Canada. The expertise of Canadian banks in the management of branch networks and in the finance of international trade was the basis on which they successfully filled an important gap in the provision of banking services for the Hispanic Caribbean and offered strong competition to the American banks that expanded into the region after 1914.

This article uses the R. G. Dun and Company credit ratings to analyze North Carolina black businessmen and their firms in the fifteen years following the Civil War. When combined with data in local histories and in the federal census, the credit ratings reveal how the postbellum black business community, especially the mulatto population, was significantly shaped by antebellum emancipation. Blacks who shared the advantage of prewar freedom employed their superior financial resources and business experience to dominate their local economies after the war. Further, both as individuals and collectively, blacks used their newly acquired political power to foster economic opportunities in ways hitherto unrecognized by both political and business history scholars.

Reflecting recent studies that have highlighted the importance of product cost accounting, this article traces the resistance of American railroad managers to the tool, despite growing pressure from academic and engineering economists. This study reveals widespread misunderstanding among managers about the nature of railroad costs, particularly misconceptions about the proportion of fixed and variable costs and the definition of direct costs. It illustrates the impact of these misapprehensions through a detailed examination of Southern Pacific's interwar passenger strategy.

Many real estate developers in the United States consciously attempted to shape residential neighborhoods, but their success in determining the spatial and social structure of communities was mixed. This article describes the methods available to land developers and realtors and examines the application of these tools to a section of Columbus, Ohio. It demonstrates that the intentions of deed restrictions and other private means of land use control were often undermined by construction delays, general economic conditions, and outmoded requirements, as well as by the timing of annexation and the subsequent application of public zoning ordinances.

This article supplies a missing piece in the story of the growth of managerial technology—the development of discounted cash flow techniques for projecting the profitability of capital budgeting alternatives. The article traces the origins of these methods in the industrial sector to the early work of railroad locating engineers and describes the refinement of DCF practices by AT&T and chemical firms. It concludes with a discussion of the diffusion of this analytic tool through the interaction of practicing engineers, consultants, professional associations, and scholarly publications.

Focusing on the Caigo Fleet Iron Company and its local competitors in Britain's Northeast, this article examines one company's response to changes in the steelmaking environment. By providing data at the firm level, the article is able to highlight specific contributing factors that are often invisible when scholars discuss Britain's industrial decline in the aggregate.

This article analyzes the creation of the Fundo Crescinco, a mutual fund that Nelson Rockefeller started in Brazil in the 1950s as part of a larger effort to continue, using private means, the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fundo Crescinco reflected both the liberal assumptions of many academicians of that era about the importance of the middle class to economic development and the concerns of business people about placating Latin American nationalism. The fund's history provides insight into the complex and often contradictory nature of U.S.-Latin American relations following the Second World War, and it demonstrates the limits of entrepreneurship as an extension of diplomacy.

The Draper Company's commitment to research and development was unparalleled among other nineteenth-century American manufacturers in older industries. This innovative drive, coupled with a strategy of patent defense and control, carried the firm to the top of the cotton textile machine industry by the end of the century. The company's 1907 decision to follow a less innovative path seemed sensible in light of its secure position in a volatile market, but the costs in long-term competitive strength were high.

This article focuses on the roles of business-government relations, technology, financing, entrepreneurship, and management in the evolution of multinational corporations. It describes the Guggenheims' successive involvements in Mexican silver, Chilean copper, and Chilean nitrates and stresses the brothers' strategic use of technical innovation and relations with host governments to accomplish these major changes in the focus of their business. The essay's findings suggest the need for a more sophisticated treatment of business-government relations and for the incorporation of entrepreneurship and organizational structure as dynamic variables in theories of the MNE. It also points to the importance of historical conjunctures that shape technology in understanding the emergence of the MNE.

In discussions of the history of real estate markets a key role clearly must be assigned to financial institutions, yet our knowledge of their various structures, particularly before the late nineteenth century, remains sketchy. One organization created to facilitate real estate purchases in the absence of other institutional sources of mortgage loans was the building society, either permanent or terminating. This article gathers together the information available about terminating building societies in mid-nineteenth century Quebec City. After an explanation of the societies' objectives and regulations, the article examines the difficulties that these societies faced as a result of general economic fluctuations and of the changing desires of members, who often wished to use the societies to place savings at interest rather than for home purchase.

In tracing the work of Edwin Gay in the mobilization effort during the First World War, this article presents an intriguing picture of the wartime administration's gradual realization of its need for more accurate information for central economic and political decision making. Although Gay's specific agency was short-lived, the work he did, and the viewpoint he represented, contributed significantly to the search for coherent administration in the executive branch.