business history

After Brown v. Board, Segregationists also Attacked "Woke" Businesses

by Lawrence B. Glickman

When two TV networks decided in 1956 to no longer air racist lyrics to popular songs by Stephen Foster and other minstrelsy holdovers, some southern segregationists took the move as an attack on the very foundations of civilization. 

Can Activists Use Banking Regulations to Force Decarbonization?

by Bart Elmore

After Clinton-era reforms enabled consolidation of the banking industry, environmental groups in the early 2000s began to target the commercial banking sides of the firms that raised capital and provided credit to the fossil fuels industry. 

Inside a Key Part of the Republican Base: Car Dealers

As legally protected middlemen who do business in every part of the country, auto dealers have been political players for a century. 

Coca Cola Can't Go Green While Selling Drinks Cold

by Bart Elmore

If the worldwide beverage giant wants to reduce its carbon footprint, it's time for it to reverse its historical commitment to make its drinks available cold—in electric coolers—across the globe.

Review: New Book Worships the False Idol of the Responsible Corporation

The idea of corporate social responsibility is an artifact of the domination of society by big business, a domination so powerful as to make alternatives exceedingly difficult to imagine. A new book internalizes that difficulty. 

Pessimistic Economic Forecasts Ignore a History of Dynamism

by John Landry and Howard Wolk

Many economic histories portray the American prosperity of the century between the Civil War and the 1970s as the picking of low-hanging fruit. But the story of entrepreneurial innovation during that time is more complicated, and more relevant to the present, than we think. 

Companies Worried about Worker Turnover? Benefits and Baseball Worked at the Turn of the 20th Century

by Jeffrey Smith

A generation of industrialists adopted a slate of extracurricular benefits like baseball teams as part of a welfare capitalist movement to improve production and thwart unionization. 

The Revolt of the Super Employees

by Erik Baker

The business managerial ethos established in the 1980s destroyed the idea of solidarity and replaced it with a fantasy version of meritocracy. Now, upper-middle management is having the rug pulled out from under it, and they're mad. Are they mad enough to recognize the faults of the system? 

The Great White(washing) Way: Business History on Broadway Without Slavery

by Imani Perry

The new show "The Lehman Trilogy" tells a heroic story of German Jewish immigrant brothers who rose to the top of American finance, but it tells it without reference to the labor of enslaved people that made it possible. 

The Connection Between Conservative Christianity and Fast Food Franchises

by Marcia Chatelain

Many fast food chains have roots in two pillars of 20th-century conservatism: Christianity and free markets.

Capitalism American-Style: A Financial History of the United States

“Ages of American Capitalism" by Jonathan Levy sheds light on U.S. history as seen through a financial lens. 

Our Insurance Dystopia

by Caley Horan

America's health insurance morass is a result of the replacement of the ideal of mutual, universal risk sharing with the privatization of risk in pursuit of profit. 

The Men Who Turned Slavery Into Big Business

by Joshua D. Rothman

"We still live in the world that Franklin and Armfield’s profits helped build, and with the enduring inequalities that they and their industry entrenched."

How To Make An Oligopoly

by Brittany McWilliams

A document from the Eli Lilly corporate archives shows how the pharmaceutical giant strategized to control the global market in insulin. 

The Food that Built America: The Kings of Burgers

Historians Marcia Chatelain and Mireya Loza are featured in the History Channel's documentary on the rise of fast food in America. 

Donald Kendall, Who Built Pepsico into a Soda and Snack-Food Giant, Dies at 99

The late president of Pepsi-Cola was a leader in bringing American products to the Soviet bloc and Communist China during the cold war and was influential in pushing Richard Nixon to support the CIA's coup against democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende in Chile.

Anne Fleming: Business Historians Remember

Anne Fleming is remembered as an outstanding scholar and generous colleague. 

Robots Don't Catch the Coronavirus

by Alan Singer

Companies have used federal funding in previous crises for selfish, rather than public, ends. In the COVID-19 crisis some are using bailout funds to make jobs permanently disappear. 

As Amazon Rises, So Does the Opposition

Ms. Mitchell is 47, a historian by training. But her real role is the strategist of the demise of Amazon as we know it.

"Rogue" Manufacturing in China: Past and Present

by Eugenia Lean

As China’s economic power grows, global intellectual property might end up looking more and more like the Chinese tradition of shanzhai in the future.