The Age of Electricity was foreshadowed by the “battle of the currents.” This almost forgotten controversy had important technological implications, but it is also a macabre chapter in the history of marketing tactics. Westinghouse's superior alternating current system was ingeniously attacked by proponents of direct current. Exploiting contemporary evidence from the penitentiary, the direct-current adherents declaimed against use by the public of a system employed by the state to rid itself of its most dangerous criminals.

The stock market boom and bust of the late 1920's has been closely associated by scholars and public alike with the great changes in American life that followed closely thereafter. Actually, the interrelationship is far from clear, and a better understanding of the capital market is needed. Historical evidence points to the absence of effective market regulation and to the violation of accepted norms of monetary policy, but the only clear-cut causal connection between levels of economic activity and the stock boom lies in the effect of security inflation on the psychological climate of the business community.

The first fire insurance program of the Hohenzollern was an important phase in the growth of the concept of risk coverage, incorporating many features regarded as standard in modern insurance practice. The Brandenburg-Berlin scheme also reflected the strengths and weaknesses of a benevolent despotism in its attempts to force the citizenry to protect itself against an admitted menace of major proportions.

The unique features of ownership patterns in the early New England textile industry have long been recognized. Hitherto it has been the interlocking or horizontal relationships that have been studied. This article deals, instead, with the vertical pattern — describing ownership in terms of occupational groupings of all the investors rather than the kinship of the dominant owners. Conclusions are drawn in respect to such important points as the principal sources of textile capital, the rate of mercantile capital reinvestment in manufacturing, the relationship between investment and industry integration, and the increasing importance of nonbusiness and institutional vested interests.