Research on entrepreneurship remains fragmented in business history. A lack of conceptual clarity inhibits comparisons between studies and dialogue among scholars. To address these issues, we propose to reinvent entrepreneurial history as a research field. We define “new entrepreneurial history” as the study of the creative processes that propel economic change. Rather than putting actors, hierarchies, or institutions at the center of the analysis, we focus explicitly on three distinct entrepreneurial processes as primary objects of study: envisioning and valuing opportunities, allocating and reconfiguring resources, and legitimizing novelty. The article elaborates on the historiography, premises, and potential contributions of new entrepreneurial history.

Drawing on corporate materials from the Banque de France, this article reveals a fact that is rarely raised in the study of foreign investment in France: among American investment in France, there are many cases in which French companies took the initiative in seeking American investment. Not all French companies were hostile to U.S. enterprises, even during the upsurge of French anti-Americanism, and the French Fifth Republic's restrictive policies toward American investment were not as rigorous as they might have appeared. Their major objective was to increase French competitiveness.

These are “interesting times” for the Founding Fathers—“interesting” in the ironical sense in which the word is employed popularly, but also in the apocryphal Chinese curse. For example, for several decades now, writers such as Gary Wills, Joseph Ellis, Ron Chernow, and Richard Brookhiser have been tapping into large general audiences with best-selling studies on the Founding Fathers. At the same time, numerous dyspeptic faculty members—including, alas, some influential College Board consultants—have decried the “overattention” being paid to “dead white males,” however distinguished, and in so doing, often succeeded in easing the Founding Fathers off of both the historical stage and the scantron sheets of the SAT.

Someone could go a long way toward telling the story of my life through its magazines: the Highlights my parents gave me, determined that my small self should be as entertained and enlightened as possible; my grandparents’ neatly collected Readers’ Digests, which I eagerly read until learning my freshman year in college that they were hopelessly bourgeois; the New Yorkers I loved and displayed in my graduate student apartment, the Vanity Fairs I loved and hid under the bed. Magazines tell the story of who I was supposed to be and who I wanted to be. Or perhaps they don't; how much of what the magazines meant to me is visible in the historical record? I didn't purchase all that I read, after all, nor did I read all that I purchased. A magazine I loved one year might embarrass me the next, and then find its way back into favor, my subscription all the while remaining unchanged. Magazines, in short, are both perplexing and promising subjects of analysis, with the question of how they create communities of readers posing perhaps the most promising and perplexing question of all.

This text, looking to identify and problematize the “challenge of inequality” for society today through undertaking a global history of inequality from the Stone Age to the present, is very much one of our time, and arguably one for our time. It can be aligned persuasively with how an intensifying concern about social and actually human dimensions of key societal institutions—especially economic and political ones—has followed the “first crisis of globalisation” (Gordon Brown, Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation [2010]) and new discursive spaces have emerged to support analyses that stand apart from traditional economics or primarily economics-oriented approaches.

Louis Armstrong was once asked to define “swing.” His response was—probably apocryphally—“if you have to ask, you'll never know.” But when it comes to defining and understanding capitalism, “you'll know it when you see it” answers do not suffice. Defining precisely what we mean by capitalism has never been easy. Capitalism is a “keyword,” to use Raymond Williams's term, a touchstone in our cultural and political debates. For Williams, keywords have “a history and complexity of meanings; conscious changes, or consciously different uses; of innovation, obsolescence, specialization, extension, overlap, transfer” (Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [1976]). And there is good reason to think that, over the past generation, as capitalism has globalized, both surged and failed, and largely displaced its former rivals to the left, socialism and communism, the problems of precisely saying what we mean when speak of capitalism has only become more difficult.

By now many of you have heard about, considered reading (if not deterred by its 762-page girth), and even dipped into Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. This tome well deserves the attention that it has received for addressing a burning issue today: economic stagnation and its origins. Taking the long view with both summary statistics of trends in growth between 1870 and the present, but also with an amazing variety of graphs and charts detailing patterns of growth in a wide variety of industries, Gordon chronicles the impact of the second and third industrializations. His oft-repeated argument is simple, that growth was revolutionary in the history of humanity in the century after 1870, resulting from the effects of the second industrialization (launched by electricity and the internal combustion engine especially), and raising living standards in profound but unrepeatable ways. Though he finds the 1920s to 1970 to be most dramatic in growth rates (especially resulting from technology and innovation measured by total factor productivity [TFP]—accounting for growth outside resource inputs), after 1970 that productivity was barely a third of the previous century despite the digitalization of the third industrialization, which contributes only 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This lag is especially evident since 2004 with no reasonable prospects for reversal, and the decline in the rate of growth has been accompanied by increasing income inequality with demographic lags and other “headwinds” further threatening growth. The argument is predominately based on technological change, though Gordon recognizes the role of government and even unions (in raising wages) and less often business innovation in advancing growth. Much of the book's reception has been shaped by economists and economic historians addressing this bold claim, and it has been compared with Thomas Piketty's even more ambitious work on the trend toward inequality.

The Highest Glass Ceiling appeared just before the 2016 election. Hillary's ghost hovers. The U.S. presidency remains a male stronghold with its glass ceiling intact. Fitzpatrick and her publisher undoubtedly saw opportunity in a probable Clinton victory. There is a brief prologue and epilogue about Clinton that bookends the biographies of three other women who competed for the presidency in different eras: Victoria Woodhull, the Equal Rights Party candidate in 1872; Margaret Chase Smith, the 1964 Republican nominee; and Shirley Chisholm, the 1972 Democratic challenger.

In 1861, the North and South went to war for the West. Although that statement may seem oversimplified and extreme, it goes to the heart of the matter: Southerners wanted to spread slavery into the new western territories, and Northerners had used their clout in the electoral college to elect Abraham Lincoln, whose party had committed itself to stopping the growth of the peculiar institution. The rest of that story is well known, but the same cannot be said for how the West shaped the war and how the war shaped the West.