The great expansion of American blast furnace capacity since 1938 has worked significant changes in the geographical distribution of the industry. Many persons have assumed that the furnaces erected at new locations have abnormally high costs for their mineral raw materials, and that their survival, like their origin, is dependent on the boom market of wartime and postwar, Federal financing, and accelerated amortization for tax purposes. This analysis is not correct. From the viewpoint of raw materials cost, the furnaces at relatively new locations in Utah, California, and northeast Texas, are lust as efficient as the furnaces at older locations such as Chicago and Pittsburgh. The data for the cost analysis which follows were collected directly from the firms involved.

A heal tithing office or bishop's storehouse was found in every Mormon settlement of the Mountain West during the nineteenth century. Besides functioning as collector of revenue for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the tithing house played a major role in the economic life of the community. It served as communal receiving and disbursing agency, warehouse, weighing station, livestock corral, general store, telegraph office, employment exchange and social security bureau. These functions carried it into banking, the fixing of official prices, and bulk selling. Thus the history of this institution shows, in a much different setting, counterparts of many procedures and problems open regarded as distinctly modern.

The development of industry in South Carolina to 1860 is analyzed carefully, using information culled from manuscript census returns and the correspondence of businessmen. The failure of manufacturing to grow more rapidly is ascribed to a shortage of capital and skilled management, an unfortunate geography, competition for factors of production by local agriculture, and competition in the product markets by Northern industry.

Skilled textile workers migrated from Scotland to Massachusetts in the 1850's because of a large wage differential and low steerage rates for the transatlantic passage. For each one of 56 women weavers in the Lyman Mills, expenditures on current consumption took less than 75 per cent of income. But the circumstances were unusual, so this sample does not permit any conclusions about the role of wage-earners' savings in the accumulation of capital in New England. In this mill, two-thirds of the labor force in 1860 had been working there less than three years. The impact of this high degree of labor mobility on labor relations and on the technology of the industry is tentatively assessed.