It is London 1856. William Henry Perkin serendipitously invents the first synthetic dye while he is trying to synthesize quinine, a medicine for malaria. The nineteen-year-old Perkin leaves the Royal College of Chemistry and quickly commercializes his aniline purple dye, launching the synthetic dye industry. From that time on, the industry continues to dazzle the eye with ever new and appealing dye colors. Perkin, along with entrepreneurs from Britain and France, dominates the synthetic dye industry for the next eight years. During this period, British and French firms introduce most other innovative synthetic dyes onto the market, and they hold the largest global market share.

Rather than appearing full-blown in the 1970s, flexible production techniques were developed gradually in the Japanese automobile industry. After World War II, drawing on indigenous expertise derived from the cotton textile and aircraft industries, pioneering automakers Nissan and Toyota adapted Western-style automation technology, particularly transfer machines, to local conditions. In addition to building flexibility into as many aspects of this inherently inflexible technology as possible, manufacturers also worked to adapt labor and supplier relations to the needs of the new technology within the constraints of the local environment.

Beauty culture shaped the work experiences of women factory operatives and office staff at the Maidenform company in complex ways during the 1940s and 1950s. Through advertising, the company newsletter, beauty contests, “Pin-Up of the Month” competitions, and the ultra-feminine form made possible by the company's brassieres and girdles, Maidenform helped define postwar commercial beauty culture. Maidenform employees also had a hand in defining beauty culture, making it an important part of workplace sociability. In the process of producing and consuming workplace beauty culture at Maidenform, women from a wide range of class and ethnic backgrounds participated in the dominant gender ideal fostered by their employer. At the same time, however, their work culture remained rooted in their own class and ethnic identities. This article will examine the ways in which working women at Maidenform used commercial beauty culture to negotiate these divergent identities.

The familiar neighborhood paper boy was a product of the Depression, born of the need to boost revenues and improve readership. Operating funds for newspapers swiftly declined in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash. Circulation managers responded with one of the few resources at their command—inexpensive juvenile labor. Drawing on connections linking men and boys in the marketplace, circulation heads fashioned a gendered managerial philosophy that was distinctive to their industry. This approach, here termed masculine guidance, revitalized daily news delivery and transformed the relationship between middle-class childhood and paid work in the United States.

During the 1996 annual meeting of the Business History Conference, a session on the World Wide Web attracted considerable attention from curious members (see Business and Economic History 25 [Fall 1996]: 46—54). The Internet was then somewhat of an infant, and most of us, just becoming accustomed to the speed and convenience of electronic mail, were barely aware of the opportunities afforded by the then-new graphical interface known as the Web. No more! At least not in the United States, where advertisers bombard us with their Internet addresses and news accounts inform us of vast fortunes made in new Internet ventures that have not yet turned a profit. There is, in short, a “dot.com” revolution occurring in American business. It is also happening, albeit more slowly, in scholarly and educational circles.

In 1973 at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), one of the first local area networking (LAN) technologies was invented: Ethernet. Today, Ethernet is the dominant LAN standard but, as is the case with most other information technologies, Ethernet was neither the only available alternative nor a technology well suited for all networking needs from the outset. In fact, when it was first commercialized in 1980, Ethernet was a relatively expensive, high-end technology, suited for connecting minicomputers or workstations but too expensive for connecting microcomputers or personal computers (PCs), soon to be the largest LAN market.

This article is a pioneering exploration of technological change in the U.S. foundry industry from the period of its most dramatic growth through its interwar stagnation and decline. Not only does it describe key changes in the mechanization and reorganization of manufacturing processes that helped transform parts of the industry into sites of classic “Fordist” mass production, but it also explains why the impact of these changes was so slow and limited. Through analysis that divides the “foundry industry” into its constituent parts (defined in terms of the forms of business organization and the types of product market that characterized them), the article locates change and continuity within different sectors of an “industry” that was in fact plural rather than singular.

Longstanding debates among academic historians about the role of the narrative and the need (or not) for relevance are not likely to end any time soon. Business historians have been relatively unreflective about such matters, at least compared with, say, labor or women’s historians, who regularly sprinkle their journals with historiographic reassessments. Perhaps this is because there was little on the theoretical end of the scale in business history to sustain earnest debate prior to the publication of Alfred Chandler’s first masterwork, Strategy and Structure, scarcely more than a generation ago. Still, it was Allan Nevins—the journalist cum Columbia University history professor whose prodigious writings included several elegant business biographies—who memorably satirized the history academy with “Dr. Dry-as-Dust,” a crusty purveyor of densely ponderous prose for like-minded scholarly elites.

The reasons why photographic illustration was generally avoided by American print advertisers before 1913, even though halftone technology had made such illustration economically advantageous, have not been adequately explored. This article explains that art directors initially avoided the medium because of its slavish dependence on material reality. Photography offered too much detail; it seemed incapable of the abstraction or idealization necessary for “capitalist realism.” The change in this outlook can be dated from the work of Lejaren à Hiller, who, borrowing fine art aesthetics and techniques from pictorialist photography, established the medium as suitable for the complex visual and narrative strategies required by the social tableaux advertising of the period.

This article places the British and American postal telegraph movements in the broader context of a transatlantic reform tradition. More specifically, British nationalization in 1870 gave American reformers both a rallying point and a rationale for postalizing the telegraphs. The legacies of both movements were mixed. In Britain, the postal telegraph provided inexpensive and accessible service, but it soon ran a large deficit and retarded the development of the telephone industry. In the United States, reformers failed to nationalize the telegraph or to secure a place in historical memory, but they succeeded in pressuring Western Union to provide better service, and they provided the impetus for the municipal ownership movement of the Progressive Era.

In the aftermath of World War II, Japanese companies looked to the United States as a model of middle-class, consumer-driven prosperity. Although living conditions in Japan were very different from those in the United States, Japanese companies imported product technologies and management techniques that helped them realize their vision of a mass consumer society. For electrical goods companies, the countryside represented a special challenge, as conservative values and traditional family structures hindered sales. In time, however, electrical goods companies were able to overcome these obstacles, and in the process they became major players in the transformation of peasants into consumers.