Business history as a differentiated subject is of comparatively recent origin in the American academic scene. It has naturally been most closely associated with collegiate schools of business, and particularly with those offering graduate or semi-graduate programs of instruction. It now seems appropriate to inquire what rôle it plays in such programs, what should be its content, how it should be presented, and what relationship it has to the closely associated fields of economic history, economics, business administration, and public administration

The over-all challenge to research in business history is to provide facts and generalizations concerning the history of business which may lead to a better understanding of business itself and of its rôle in society. This is an urgent challenge in our age of revolution, a revolution in which the generally expressed objective is a better and more secure living, the political tool being largely economic class conflict, and the target, private capitalism.

The major challenge to historians today is the same whether one's research lies in business history or general history. It is to focus the rapidly growing social knowledge of the mid-twentieth century upon historical materials and to do this mainly by asking new questions of the records, questions that will make history an analytic as well as a descriptive discipline.

The historian of business is peculiarly well placed to meet this challenge. He works with the human element in an area that heretofore has been the concern of the oldest, most complex, and least humanistic social theory, economics. That is, by the nature of his materials the historian of business is forced to seek a reconciliation between actual human behavior and the implications of rigorous economic analysis. A similar challenge is offered in harnessing each of the other social sciences to the business historian's task. In so far as he succeeds in remolding these analytical disciplines to fit reality in the sphere of business, he solves the major problems of all historians and all social scientists.

Both Disraeli and Walter Leaf are credited with having said that there are three things that drive men to madness: love, ambition, and the study of currency problems. Regardless of the origin of the quotation, both men were happily innocent of the vast potentialities inherent in teaching business history. For teaching business history is a chain of problems. And problems and challenges are synonymous. To cite a few: What shall be the purpose of teaching business history? Shall the subject be presented by the case method or in a less specific and more abstract way? Having answered these problems more or less to his own satisfaction, the instructor is then confronted with the ubiquitous problem of defining the entrepreneur. And he is constantly plagued by the incidental problems of overcoming the amorphous nature of the subject, not to speak of the monumental tasks of correcting the preconceived and fallacious notions of the student and overcoming the vast mass of misleading and misinformed interpretations that parade under the name business history. But these are the inevitable problems in the teaching of business history.

Business history, as distinct from economic history, is now being taught on the freshman, senior, and graduate levels in a number of colleges and universities. I am to speak only on the problems and challenges of teaching business history on the freshman level, but in this connection I shall mention the desirability of courses for senior and graduate students.

A familiar figure on the roads of the Middle West during the second half of the last century was the lightning-rod salesman with his wagon. In an area frequently visited by thunder storms, there was a ready market for the latest adaptation of Franklin's protective device. Even in frontier towns, new buildings were not long unequipped with rods, their points tipped with platinum and perhaps ornamented with glass balls. The preservation of two record books, a ledger, and a few letters enables us to tell the story (or at least part of it) of the firm largely responsible for the widespread acceptance of this method of protection against lightning. Cole Brothers, of Mount Pleasant in southeastern Iowa, was a family company, but the fact that its owners were four brothers does not mean that the minutes of their meetings are any less frank or complete. One must only regret that the surviving volumes start after the business had been under way for some time and stop many years before the firm disbanded. However, the story of the intervening years in the life of the company reveals not only steady growth, despite temporary setbacks, but also the interplay of personalities. An enterprise responsible for a product in common use by our ancestors (one which shows signs of returning popularity) is for a moment illumined.

The memoir of William Cripps covers two periods of business activity. The first dated from 1819, when he sailed to New York to begin his career as an agent for the export of Nottingham lace, and ended with his first retirement in 1845. The second began in 1859, when through the roguery of a business associate he found himself a ruined man and, with the aid of the many friends of his youth in New York and Boston, he was successful in founding the Standard Fire Insurance Company of which he remained president until his second retirement in 1879. He then returned to England and in 1882 wrote the memoir here published.

“English accounting practice has been developing for many years, but it has not made any substantial contribution to economic science over its own field of the analysis of the results of industry, although it has practically a monopoly grip of the required data. Accountants have the figures; other people cannot use them and if accountants will not, then we get nothing; economics continues its abstract declarations and business blunders on by individual instinct.” This ringing challenge delivered by the late Lord Stamp more than twenty-five years ago has not been fully met by either the English or the American accounting profession. An assessment of progress to date and an analysis of the factors impeding accounting research are the purposes of this paper.

Though their roots reach back for centuries, both public relations and the corporation annual report have reached semi-maturity only during the present century. Business public relations began with the reaction of the first customer to the goods, services, and personality of the first man who offered some commodity—the ham of a squirrel, a live coal, a stone spear—for sale or barter. Everyone has business public relations of some sort, and even those modern companies which still disdain any formal public relations cannot escape the fact that daily they produce some sort of relations reaction in dealing with their segment of the public. As for corporation annual reports, they go back to the time the first corporation totaled its receipts and expenditures at the end of the first year and told its stockholders that they had lost or made so much money. From those beginnings have developed a public relations field that is today a professional science, albeit somewhat ambiguous, and corporation annual reports that rival the sleek magazines in budget requirements, circulation, attention-getting features, and the worry and labor of the staff which prepares them.

Editor's Note: This memorandum of a manager of a Hearst hacienda in Mexico from 1922 to 1931 records an episode in the re-distribution of lands during the revolution which began in 1910. This memorandum, set down soon after the events which it records, is indicative of the methods used by revolutionary governments and officials in fulfilling their promise of land to their agrarian followers. It also illustrates the resulting confusion to business managers and the insecurity of property, especially foreign-owned. By such methods a great deal of foreign management and capital was driven out of Mexico.

When I agreed to recount the story of the Business Historical Society, I naturally thought it was my own swan song that was expected. The occasion was presented to me as the probable closing of a period in the history of the Society and the opening of another day. On thinking over the events of the last twenty-five years, however, I have discovered a number of facts of larger issue and have had a chance to peer beneath the curtain of changing circumstances of world-wide import. The Business Historical Society is not just one more of those numerous American organizations that display our national weakness. It was set up under circumstances of high import by men who were feeling their way toward something significant which they but vaguely understood. In this story, therefore, are revealed some of the social processes which are the fabric of our history. There is, indeed, very little of the merely antiquarian in the theme with which we have to deal—the first survey of the Business Historical Society's experiences.