As perhaps the first comprehensive historiographic and bibliographic essay on real estate history to be published, this essay casts a wide net, offering a review of the literature and suggestions for research opportunities in the many and varied streams of academic endeavor that flow into the new specialty of real estate history. Moving away from anecdotal personal and company biographies, the field is maturing and expanding toward more sophisticated and analytical studies that intersect a variety of disciplines. The exhaustive analysis of both traditional and innovative work provided in the text is complemented by a selected bibliography of the publications discussed in the article.

The following article reexamines the role of business leaders in the structural reform of American city government during the Progressive Era. In presenting a careful analysis of the fate of redevelopment plans after Baltimore's great 1904 fire, this case study argues against an unsophisticated good guy/bad guy approach to urban and business history. Historians are urged, however, not to abandon attempts to make reasoned moral judgments concerning the consequences of structural reform, but rather to base those efforts on a recognition of the deepening complexity of twentieth-century urban society.

Henry E. Huntington, according to the following article, placed his imprint on the development of his region, the Los Angeles basin, to an extent unique among urban entrepreneurs. His great wealth and foresight, and especially his interests in street railways, real estate development, and hydroelectric power, enabled him to become a de facto city planner for one of the most important metropolitan regions in the United States.

Many real estate developers in the United States consciously attempted to shape residential neighborhoods, but their success in determining the spatial and social structure of communities was mixed. This article describes the methods available to land developers and realtors and examines the application of these tools to a section of Columbus, Ohio. It demonstrates that the intentions of deed restrictions and other private means of land use control were often undermined by construction delays, general economic conditions, and outmoded requirements, as well as by the timing of annexation and the subsequent application of public zoning ordinances.

In discussions of the history of real estate markets a key role clearly must be assigned to financial institutions, yet our knowledge of their various structures, particularly before the late nineteenth century, remains sketchy. One organization created to facilitate real estate purchases in the absence of other institutional sources of mortgage loans was the building society, either permanent or terminating. This article gathers together the information available about terminating building societies in mid-nineteenth century Quebec City. After an explanation of the societies' objectives and regulations, the article examines the difficulties that these societies faced as a result of general economic fluctuations and of the changing desires of members, who often wished to use the societies to place savings at interest rather than for home purchase.