The glamor of the American whale fishery has tended to obscure its economic outlines and significance. For certain areas one of the first successful efforts at natural resources exploitation, the fisheries developed centers of highly specialized technical and administrative skills. Capital amassed in whaling was a far from inconsequential economic force when it was shifted into other channels of investment. The shifting process itself highlights the circumstances surrounding a dying industry and provides an example of variant national investment patterns.

The practice of giving advice to employees is probably as old as the employer-employee relationship itself, but personnel counseling has become institutionalized over the past half-century and provides an example of the emergence of a specialized staff function.

Conventional for the time in his basic economic thinking, Charles Elliott Perkins was nevertheless enough of an intellectual to discern flaws in the philosophies of natural law and free competition. Creative, literate, retiring, dedicated to enlightenment but realistic about the limitations of public education, Perkins was anything but the conventional business figure of his generation. The personal background here set forth brings into sharp focus the hitherto hazy image of one of America's great railroad leaders.

The following article served to introduce the first issue of Tradition, a German journal of business history, in October, 1956. It constitutes a review of business history generally, with particular reference to progress and ideas in Germany, notes of efforts in other Continental countries, and comparative references to American progress. Guideposts are set up both for the journal and for scholars active in the field. These illustrate certain unique problems facing German historians, but at the same time emphasize the existence of broad agreement among business historians on basic goals and operating methods. Reprinted in translation through the courtesy of Tradition and of Professor Wilhelm Treue, Editor.

The main lines of the Eastern Rail-road served a rich coastal trade, yet even in an age of great commercial expansion this historic railroad enterprise courted continual disaster. The crisis of 1855 (Spring, 1957, Business History Review) had been compounded out of unprofitable branch connections, poor management, and a major defalcation. Reorganization promised a better future, but history repeated. Management generally chose to cover up, rather than correct, the operational and financial weaknesses that existed. New mistakes were made — and concealed. Ineffective management controls left power concentrated in a few careless hands. The inevitable final crisis in the mid-seventies paved the way for absorption of Eastern by the Boston & Maine — a major step in the building of that system. Through this narrative of repetitious error runs the thread of railroading progress — cut-and-try improvements in management techniques, in competitive strategy, and in operating methodology.

The early development of Rochester as a flour-milling center demonstrates several themes. Here, as in countless other places, the resiliency of the petty capitalist in the face of natural disasters and violent commodity price swings stands clear. But the early millers, flexible and energetic in entrepreneurial activity, were also, like their product, perishable. The broader and more important pattern is that of the persistence of an industry favored by basic geographic and market circumstances. Individual milk succumbed in rapid sequence, but rapidly they were replaced. Surviving the handicap of limited capital, the milling industry burst its heal bonds and exploited the regional potentialities of water access to Canada. Transition to what then amounted to a national market came in 1823, when the Erie Canal linked Rochester with the Hudson. Thus a new epoch was forecast, when a broadened market would not only stimulate local growth but shape it through complex economic influences hitherto little felt by the millers on the Genesee.