Every learned profession possesses an historical background, a traditional heritage, upon which all contemporary practice is based. In accountancy, the summarization of this background is found in the lives of practitioners who have combated business secrecy and unethical procedures, and elevated the profession in the regard of the general public. Members of the profession of public accountancy owe a deep debt of gratitude to their predecessors who have not only sustained it in the regard of the layman but, in addition, advanced its principles and techniques.

In this complex world little can be done without records. Correspondence, memoranda, reports, surveys, inventories, plans, charts, blueprints, fiscal records, legal records, and hundreds of other varieties are all needed so that modern society can function with some degree of control. Business records are accumulating at a staggering rate; for example, one insurance company has acquired over 800,000 cubic feet in a period of about 70 years. The war period with its increased production and added personnel has, of course, accentuated the entire problem.

After the Revolution merchandise locally manufactured was largely custom-made for the consumer. America's colonial merchants had combined the rôles of importers, exporters, bankers, middlemen, and shopkeepers. Only gradually, in the larger eastern centers, manufacturing other than for direct consumer use developed. It continued as a handicraft, however. The employer disposed of his surplus over local requirements through peddlers who scoured the adjacent countryside on foot or in peddlers' carts. As New England factories and mills developed, shoes, dry goods, tinware, cloth, clocks, firearms, hats, salt, and all the miscellaneous output of its infant industries were peddled throughout the land. Experience as a peddler was the school for the Yankee youth of the day destined for a mercantile career. Out of the towns each spring poured a hoard of young men with flowered carpetbags or with tin trunks strapped to their backs, afoot or with horse and wagon, headed for as distant a point as the Canadian border to the north or as far as Georgia to the south.

A few miles from my home, there nestles in the friendly atmosphere of the Green Mountains of Vermont a hamlet of fifty people, known as South Reading: just a sleepy little neighborhood now, but formerly a thriving, active community. Here were located a map-printing shop, several sawmills, a grist mill, a woolen mill, a chair factory, a smithery, and a tannery.

The commercial drummer seems to have occupied an important place in English trade for some time before his services were widely employed in this country. An article in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine in 1839 called attention to this situation and suggested that American business men were missing a real opportunity in not adopting similar methods. English drummers who called on the country trade had already acquired the stock characteristics that Americans only at a later date recognized as belonging to the occupation — the sample case as a badge of identification, together with a thorough grasp of the latest scandal for the entertainment of customers.

The use of highly specialized techniques for financing equipment on railroads in the United States became common soon after the Civil War. Comparatively little is known, however, of their origins and early evolution. Much of the published information on early railroad equipment financing is concerned with federal, State, and municipal government aids to the new railroads. Because public financing was a matter of public record, that story has been preserved in considerable detail. Unfortunately this has not been the case with private financing. The lack of specific data in this field has obscured important historical precedents for the equipment trust and conditional sale agreements, which were to become so important in the later decades of the 19th century. It is particularly interesting, therefore, to examine some original and hitherto unpublished manuscript material which presents examples of railroad equipment financing as early as 1838.

The way in which business men “translate” economic policy into business policy has never been studied systematically, but the subject is worth investigating. This problem first came to my attention in connection with some research in the field of economic history, and I have recently run across a case which merits description though broader conclusions cannot be drawn at this time.

In the history of man there have been many occupations but none more important than war, business, and religion. We shall consider at length the course of the first two, without neglecting the third, during the period of the last 600 years.

In December the Business Historical Society presented to its members a new book, WEAF: A Pioneer in Commercial Broadcasting, by William P. Banning. This volume is concerned with the beginnings of the radio industry, which has become so very important both economically and culturally in the brief span of about a quarter-century. The experimentation involved led to the creation of the American way of commercial broadcasting.

Someone may say that he has not yet learned what a business history is and therefore that he is in no position to consider the types of business history that may exist. Perhaps, however, it may help in grasping the essentials of business history if these types are set forth.

Right at the beginning of this effort we should note that we have in mind the history of a business unit — a business man, a firm, or a company. To be sure, there are other approaches to business history, namely, the history of a function, such as production or marketing, the history of a whole industry, such as meat-packing or cotton textiles, and, of course, the general history of business.

Any person who could devise measures by which the fluctuations in modern business could be eliminated, or materially reduced, would undoubtedly carve for himself a deep niche in the Hall of Fame. Both business men and observers of economic phenomena have noted that recurring crises seem almost as inevitable as the setting of the sun, if not so regular. If the severity of crises could be mitigated, solvent firms might not fail as often as they do, and the erratic economic course of man might not be subject to such violent ups and downs.

It was the topography of a trout stream which first set my thoughts in the direction of local business history, and then led to broader fields of research. Mill ponds and crumbling masonry are more or less traditional parts of the New England landscape. I should be willing to pass them over with the customary casual notice, were it not that increasing familiarity with some of Massachusetts' “backwoods” country began to reveal what looked like a remarkable pattern of local development. There was a positively idyllic stage of research when, with fly rod in hand, I examined the dams and sluiceways on half a dozen local streams, and pondered the archeological evidences of antique industry. Many questions came to mind. Too early for a place in the Industrial Revolution, too numerous to fit neatly into the colonial-agrarian pattern — what system of economy did these ruins represent ? Might they not stand apart, a system of their own, drawing from the earlier and nourishing the later? The phase of inquiry succeeding superficial curiosity led to local libraries and county records. It seemed wise to concentrate initial research efforts in one area, and on one representative watercourse.

The accompanying picture of a pawnbroker's shop and sign was taken in Boston in 1946. The sign of the three balls is a common sight in the poorer sections of many American cities, and its meaning is always the same: the balls signify that within the shop loans may be obtained on the pledge of personal property. This type of loan is centuries old: it existed in ancient Greece at the time of Pericles and in ancient Rome at the time of Augustus. Professional money-lenders, either Jews or Lombards, reappeared in the Middle Ages, and their activities elicited the opposition of the Church and the hatred of the populace. Attempts to get rid of the Jewish or Lombard pawnbrokers were repeatedly made, but the result was always the same: the need of consumers for credit accommodation was so great that the money-lenders were usually recalled after a short while.