George Horace Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to 1937, dedicated his magazine to business, businessmen, and business values. As part of an early campaign to increase the Post's circulation, the Curtis Company extended their interest to the businessmen of the future. The Circulation Bureau devised a plan of recruiting middle-class boys, training them in selling techniques, and educating them in business values. Victor Pelz, a boy agent recruited in Seattle, soared to selling stardom between 1902 and 1905. During those years the Post wrote him hundreds of letters, exhorting, praising, sometimes chastising. In Victor's career and in this surviving correspondence are inscribed the business ethic of the early twentieth century with all its promise and all its contradictions.

A growing number of black men and women attempted to establish businesses in the Jim Crow South of the early twentieth century. These enterprises, which ranged from small shops and retail establishments to more substantial banks and insurance companies, were organized primarily to increase the economic self-sufficiency of black Americans. In this article, Professor Henderson chronicles the efforts of Heman Perry to develop a complex business organization in Atlanta. Although Perry failed to achieve all of his entrepreneurial goals or to sustain the businesses that he founded, his endeavors nevertheless had a significant impact on the city's later development as an important center of black business activity.

J. I. Case Company in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a long-established business faced with the challenge of rapid technological and market change in the agricultural equipment industry. The contrasting styles and policies of Marc B. Rojtman and William J. Grede, Case's two presidents during this period, represented the management tension between the desire for radical experiment and the hope of maintaining the Case traditions of quality and character. Professor Miner's study, based on interviews and on Grede's extensive papers, concentrates on Grede as director and as president. It illuminates the impact of personality on management and illustrates the complexities of adapting an old company to a new industrial world.

While the fact of Dutch capitalist involvement in building and operating the American railroad network in the nineteenth century is relatively well known, the ways in which the Amsterdam capital market was tapped by American railroad companies or their representatives have remained relatively obscure. In this article, Dr. Veenendaal, using hitherto unknown archival material, explains how the promoter of the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf Railroad (now the Kansas City Southern), Arthur E. Stilwell, set out to procure the millions he needed to realize his dream, a direct railroad from the Midwest to the Gulf.