John Franch. Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006. vii + 374 pp. ISBN 0-252-03099-0, $45.00 (paper).

Robber Baron, John Franch’s biography of Charles TysonYerkes, provides a fascinating window into the workings of laissez-fairecapitalism. Yerkes, one of the most notorious self-made menof nineteenth-century America, embodied the drive, avarice,and unscrupulousness of his age—taking each to its limits.Robber Baron is an academic work that should appeal to a wideraudience. Yerkes’s dealings are fascinating: the samemen did business with him time after time as they tried to getthe     

Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia, eds. Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xii + 369 pp. ISBN 0-19-925189-4, $99.50 (cloth); 0-19-925190-8, $29.95 (paper).

Rationality, efficiency, meritocracy, productivity, innovation,professionalism: the people who have built, operated, and championedAmerican corporations have claimed these goals and means inorder to explain how and why limited liability firms evolvedin the United States. Such powerful constructions of ideas—noless than of steel—have seduced generations of analystsand citizens into accepting once contested corporate forms asthe inevitable outcomes of irresistible economic processes. The great achievements of Constructing Corporate America liein its compelling demonstrations that U.S. corporations’forms, functions, and discourses evolved—and still change—asproducts of their     

Paul J. Kubicek. Organized Labor in Postcommunist States: From Solidarity to Infirmity. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. xiv + 256 pp. ISBN 0-8229-5856-2, $29.95 (paper).

Labor unions in formerly communist societies have gone, in justfifteen years, from being large and sometimes very powerfulorganizations—think of Poland’s Solidarity—tobeing much smaller and weaker organizations. In discussing thisweakness, Paul Kubicek notes the irony that workers in communistsocieties "were able to organize to help overthrow a systemthat purportedly ruled in their name. However, they are poorlypoised to do battle against governments and policies that makelittle pretense to serve their interests"     

Jarol B. Manheim. Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite: The Progressive-Left Attack on the Corporation. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. xii + 216 pp. ISBN 0-8058-5068-6, $34.50 (cloth).

Over the past ten years a large, diverse, and increasingly sophisticatedliterature has emerged to explain the decline—indeed thedeath—of liberalism and the rise of the New Right to politicaldominance. Jarol Manheim argues that the death knell for liberalismand the left has been rung too soon. While conservatism currentlyis the dominant American ideology, Biz-War contends that itfaces a real threat from a reinvigorated left now known by anew, less pejorative name, the Progressive movement. Manheim’s     

Thomas A. Kinney. The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xi + 381 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7946-9, $49.95 (cloth).

Although ‘horse and buggy’ usually connotes a quainticon of the preindustrial world, The Carriage Trade by ThomasA. Kinney shows that horse-drawn vehicles were anything butquaint. Carriage and wagon making was a major nineteenth-centuryindustry, employing by 1890 130,000 employees in 13,000 firmsproducing $200 million in value (p. 262). These firms were leadersin production, management, and marketing innovations. Kinney’sstraightforward account shows how mechanization, interchangeability,and rationalization changed the nature of     

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and Bruce Mazlish, eds. Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiii + 249 pp. ISBN 0-521-84061-9, $65.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54993-0, $22.99 (paper).

The advertising extract, which is this book’s first sentence,reads "Leviathans represents a path-breaking effort to lookat multinational corporations in the round, emphasizing especiallytheir scope, history, development, culture and social implication,and governance problems" (p. i). Given the appropriately globalprestige of the editors and of several of the chapters’authors, one’s curiosity is unavoidably piqued. Whilefew readers will ultimately judge the book to be path-breaking,many will welcome its contribution to     

Clifford J. Doerksen. American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xi + 157 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3871-0, $34.95 (cloth).

In American Babel: Rogue Broadcasters of the Jazz Age, CliffordDoerksen presents a lively discussion of the economic implicationsof cultural hierarchy on radio broadcasting. In this slim volume,only 176 pages (including footnotes), he tells the stories ofseveral radio pioneers who have been largely ignored in theretellings of the medium’s history. The difficulties inexploring the world of independent broadcasters long has beena lament of radio scholars, and Doerksen’s book represents     

Peter H. Spitz, ed. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium: Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization. Philadelphia, Pa.: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2003. x + 387 pp. ISBN 0-941901-34-3, $45.00 (cloth).

Peter Spitz’s new book is a continuation of his earlierwork, Petrochemicals: The Rise of an Industry (1988), whichdetailed the development of the modern chemical industry beginningin the 1930s. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium picksup the story at the end of the 1970s and examines the momentouschanges that have taken place in the last twenty-five years.Subtitled Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization, this isan excellent collection of essays by industry     

Kent H. Hughes. Building the Next American Century: The Past and Future of American Economic Competitiveness. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005. xxiii + 542 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8204-4, $55.00 (cloth); 0-8018-8203-6, $24.95 (paper).

It is paradoxical that the United States, a nation so recentlytriumphant in the Cold War, should be so gripped by anxietyabout its economic future. A burgeoning national debt and ayawning current account deficit, among other pressures, obligeAmericans to question how—and if—the next one hundredyears will bring another "American Century." Into this debatesteps longtime Washington insider Kent H. Hughes, who sets outwith the ambitious agenda of considering "America’s economicfuture and its economic past" while seeking to define a     

Geoffrey Jones. Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 340 pp. ISBN 0-19-927209-3, $144.50 (cloth); ISBN 0-19-927210-7, $44.50 (paper).

Geoffrey Jones introduces Multinationals and Global Capitalismin the preface as a radically revised edition of his The Evolutionof International Business: An Introduction (Routledge, 1996),which has hitherto remained the only history of the developmentand impact of multinationals worldwide. He indicates, quiterightly, that in the meantime globalization has been recognizedas a controversial and widely debated phenomenon. Indeed, itis indicative of the sweeping changes that have reshaped ourperceptions of the world economy that, at its publication lessthan a decade ago, Evolution was innocent of the very term ‘globalization’;     

Jeffrey M. Hornstein. A Nation of Realtors(R): A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. xi + 252 pp. ISBN 0-8223-3528-X, $79.95 (cloth); 0-8223-3540-9, $22.95 (paper).

For many people who study the culture of American business,a mention of real estate will conjure up Sinclair Lewis’sfictional creation George F. Babbitt, the title character ofthe 1922 novel Babbitt. I was reminded, when reading JeffreyHornstein’s A Nation of Realtors^®, that Lewis at onepoint used a different working title: "Population 300,000."Between these two titles lay the relationship between the characterof the Realtor and the community that the Realtor, and his peers,     

Sarah Elvins. Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. 222 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1549-2, $42.95 (cloth).

Elvins’s book is part of a growing body of historicalscholarship that interrogates the lived experience of consumersociety in the twentieth-century United States. Beginning whereWilliam Leach’s Land of Desire (1993) left off, Elvinsseeks to complicate "top-down" narratives of the homogenizationof American consumer culture into a national mass market. Takingher cue from Lizabeth Cohen’s early work on consumptionin Chicago, Elvins examines consumption on the local level in     

Leslie Berlin. The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 402 pp. ISBN 0-19-516343-5, $30.00.

The last few years have seen a number of books on the rise ofSilicon Valley. Martin Kenney’s Understanding SiliconValley (2000), Ross Bassett’s To the Digital Age (2002),Frederick Terman at Stanford by C. Stewart Gillmor (2004), andmy own book on Making Silicon Valley (2006) are notable examples.Another addition to this literature is The Man behind the Microchip:Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by     

Amy G. Richter. Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiii + 272 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2926-9, $49.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-8078-5591-X, $19.95 (paper).

In today’s fast-paced world we sometimes forget that railroadsof the nineteenth century were the first forms of transportationto annihilate time and space. Railroads, however, played a fargreater role than transforming these physical realities. Infact, Amy G. Richter’s Home on the Rails argues that railroadsbecame the sites and symbols of a reorganized cultural spacein America. Richter, an assistant professor of history at ClarkUniversity in Worcester, Massachusetts, began her study as a     

Helen Tangires. Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xiii + 263 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7133-6, $45.00 (cloth).

Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century Americaexplores and extols the role of municipally owned markets insupplying food to the nation’s urban centers. Helen Tangiresdraws data and examples from around the country, but New Yorkand Philadelphia provide her core case studies. Tangires tracesher interest in public markets to childhood experiences witha family lunch wagon in Baltimore, which doubtless contributesto the enthusiastic warmth she brings to this study. It mayalso encourage some sentimentality     

Geoffrey Jones. Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-926943-2, $64.50.

A commissioned study, Renewing Unilever analyzes the historyof one of the world’s largest and, arguably, most importantmultinational enterprises in the years after 1965. Primarilya manufacturer and seller of branded, non-durable, consumergoods, Unilever produced items that could be found in aboutone-half of households globally by the early twenty-first century.Picking up where earlier histories of Unilever by Charles Wilsonended, Geoffrey Jones very ably tells the story of Unilever’srecent activities.     

William Faricy Condee. Coal and Culture: Opera Houses in Appalachia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xii + 210 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1588-3, $34.95 (cloth).

In Coal and Culture William Condee examines Appalachian small-towntheaters built between the 1860s and 1930s that appropriatedthe high-culture term ‘opera house’ for spaces presentingdiverse activities from high school graduations to travelingtheatrical troupes. The title ‘opera house,’ ratherthan ‘theater,’ conveyed an aura of culture, refinement,and acceptability in an era when theater was sometimes regardedas having questionable morals. ‘Opera house’ soundedgrand, but many structures were modest buildings whose facadesdiffered little from     

Michael Augspurger. An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. viii + 292 pp. ISBN 0-8014-4204-4, $34.95 (cloth).

A curious blend of business and intellectual history, with anemphasis on the latter, Michael Augspurger’s An Economyof Abundant Beauty offers a reading of Fortune magazine fromits founding in 1930 through the election of Dwight D. Eisenhowerin 1952. Distancing himself from other observers of the publicationwho have interpreted Fortune’s heavy coverage of highculture and aesthetics during the 1930s alongside more prosaicbusiness news as the result of a distinct split between a progressivestaff of writers, including James Agee and Archibald MacLeish,and more conservative editors and publisher Henry Luce, Augspurgerclaims to discern a     

Simon Middleton. From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 320 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3915-6, $45.00 (paper)

The idea of a transition from small producer to capitalist productionin late eighteenth-century America, a popular topic in 1980sand 1990s, is wrong. This is the message of Simon Middleton’sFrom Privileges to Rights, a study of New York City artisansin the colonial era. Using records from the Mayor’s Court(roughly equivalent to municipal courts today), and variousother sources, Middleton finds possessive individualism to bea growing force among New York City artisans at least