The 1884 receivership of the Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific Railway is widely regarded as a turning point in the development of corporate insolvency law. It is said to have created a “new-fashioned receivership,” which enabled debtors to initiate and, to a great extent, control receiverships. It is said that these new-fashioned receiverships facilitated reorganization of the insolvent firm at the expense of creditors' rights. An examination of the history of railroad receiverships reveals that for decades before 1884 judges allowed managers to initiate receiverships, appointed managers as receivers, and forced creditors to accept changes in their contractual rights. Judges also refused to extend reorganization procedures to corporations outside the railroad industry, justifying their special treatment of railroads on the grounds that the foremost obligation of railroads was to serve the public. Analysis of railroad bond prices supports the conclusion that creditors' rights were not transformed by the courts in the mid-1880s.

The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, was established in the 1870s as a small soap producer and grew to become a large mail-order house. Larkin's success could be attributed to a unique sales strategy created by Elbert Hubbard, called “The Larkin Idea,” which had as its motto, “From Factory-to-Family: Save All Cost Which Adds No Value.” The company sold its products exclusively through the mail to women in cooperative buying clubs. Employing a variety of marketing, advertising, and employee welfare practices, the Larkin Company built a unified corporate family of “Larkinites“—employees, customers, and executives. Larkin executives also hired architect Frank Lloyd Wright to construct a modern office complex, which became the physical representation of Larkin's culture. But changes in marketing, the departure and deaths of key executives, a seemingly anachronistic corporate culture, and poor business decisions combined to undermine the company in the mid-1920s, and by 1940 the company was virtually dead.

Between the end of the Civil War and the enactment of national Prohibition in 1920, America's brewing industry grew to become one of the nation's leading manufacturing industries. During the first thirty years of this period, the industry's growth was propelled by the emergence of a small group of nationally oriented breweries. These firms pioneered a series of important technological, scientific, and organizational innovations, which allowed them to increase annual sales. Yet, after several decades of spectacular growth, they began to see their relative position in the industry decline. From the mid-1890s until Prohibition, hundreds of regional and local breweries reasserted themselves in the market for beer. These firms often were able to provide less expensive beer and to sell it in saloons that they owned or controlled. Together, these two factors enabled regional and local breweries to present a competitive challenge to national firms in the years leading up to Prohibition.

“[O]ur ladies know nothing of the sober certainties which relate to money and they cannot be taught,” wrote Frederic Tudor in 1820, in a sweeping indictment of women's financial abilities that was common for the period. Despite such stereotypes, many women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries participated in commerce, both as merchants and as manufacturers. Because they mainly oversaw small and shortlived concerns, however, their enterprises did not fit into traditional understandings of successful business, either in their own time or later, when the field of business history developed in the twentieth century. As a consequence, when Harvard Business School's Baker Library began amassing business manuscripts, curators generally concentrated on collecting the records of large firms and well-known industrialists. Their big-business bias not only affected what was collected, but also how manuscripts were processed. Search aids and cataloging records did not distinguish materials made by or about women because gender was not a compelling issue for early twentieth-century historians.