Nineteenth-century newspapers, exchanges, and governments relied heavily for their daily information upon an alliance of four international telegraph services: Havas (Paris), Reuters (London), Wolff's (Berlin), and the Associated Press (New York). The connections of the wire services to financial and official circles bred suspicions that they offered privileged information and suppressed or inserted reports on behalf of special interests. Corporate and official records reveal the wire services’ reliance upon the subsidies, information, and telegraph facilities of firms and governments. As a result, world news coverage was, if not “poisoned” at the source, at least dammed up, filtered, channeled, or watered down.

Chicago's large, diverse automotive industry specialized in truck, bus, and taxicab assembly, as well as automotive-parts manufacture, in the first decades of the twentieth century. From having just a handful of companies before World War I, by the mid 1920s Chicago grew to include more than 600 firms that were producing a wide assortment of automotiverelated products. This large, successful industry emerged out of two sets of advantages: First, Chicago's well-developed production factors—ranging from relatively advanced transportation and industrial facilities to a large labor force and an effective entrepreneurial business class—promoted industrial growth. Second, the automotive industry's production practices, elaborate division of labor, and intense set of interfirm relations encouraged metropolitan expansion. Even though the city's firms functioned both regionally and nationally, they were also deeply embedded within a local world of innovation, interaction, networks, financing, and servicing. Further adding to these advantages was Chicago's distinctive geography, which enabled a dense complex of linked, interrelated firms to flourish and contributed to the automotive industry's success before 1930.

Patterns of residential segregation in late-nineteenth-century southern cities had great influence on the type of African American business that developed. They also affected the relative stability of business enterprise. In neighborhoods with a higher degree of segregation, African American entrepreneurs were able to develop vital businesses that survived the worsening climate of race relations around the turn of the century.

Emmett Jay Scott was private secretary to Booker T. Washington and later became secretary treasurer of Howard University. He was involved in numerous business activities, ranging from the establishment of the National Negro Business League to the founding of an investment clearing-house, an insurance company, and an overseas trading firm. Scott also promoted the black township of Mound Bayou and backed African American entertainment enterprises. His business activities were largely unheralded, and the frustrations he encountered illustrate both the obstacles and the opportunities for black entrepreneurs in the first half of the twentieth century.

We surveyed fifty-eight professors of history and management to develop a ranking of the greatest entrepreneurs and businesspeople in American history. The goal of this research is to begin an ongoing conversation about what constitutes “greatness” in American business history, and, in particular, how academics perceive greatness among business leaders. The results were predictable: Henry Ford topped the list, followed by Bill Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Thomas Edison. We also surveyed these scholars regarding greatest female and most underrated entrepreneur or businessperson in American history to make the exercise more interesting.