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     

AT&T: 1908 Origins of the Nation's Oldest Continuous Institutional Advertising Campaign

When Theodore N. Vail became president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in 1907 there was considerable public animosity toward AT&T for a number of reasons, including the company's aggressive suppression of competition under earlier leadership. With the assistance of the N. W. Ayer & Son advertising agency. Vail launched a national magazine advertising campaign to court public opinion. Vail hoped to make the public aware of the quality of service provided by AT&T licensees, to persuade the public to a more favorable opinion of AT&T and, above all, to sway the public in favor of the concept of the telephone industry as a natural and beneficent monopoly. The five pioneering institutional ads for AT&T prepared by N. W. Ayer in 1908 marked the beginning of an advertising program which continues uninterrupted down to the present day.     

Carl A. Zimring. Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. xi + 220 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3686-3, $39.95.

Paul Revere rode to Concord on a horse shod with shoes re-forgedfrom scrap iron. New York City’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg,misstepped when he decided that residents would sort only thoserecyclables that actually had a market, rather than the beveragecontainers that went straight to the landfill. During the intervening226 years, Americans recycled for reasons of economy, and ontothat base we recently have grafted a goal of recycling to promoteenvironmental quality. Carl Zimring’s Cash For Your Trashlinks     

Gordon Boyce. Over Half a Million Careful Owners: A 75-year history of PSIS, 1928-2003. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2005. 326 pp. ISBN 0-476-0129-29, NZ$29.95 (paper).

Gordon Boyce traces the history of New Zealand’s PSIS,the Public Service Investment Society, in a book commissionedby the company. Boyce, now Professor of International Businessat Queensland University of Technology after thirteen yearsof teaching business and economic history at Victoria Universityof Wellington, is well qualified for the project. His recentpublications include Co-operative Structures in Global Business(2002). Boyce fulfills his commission well, narrating an engagingstory. "Vignettes" provide personal and anecdotal details thatformer staff     

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     

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     

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     

John Storey, ed. The Management of Innovation. 2 vols. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004. xxxi + 734 pp. (vol. 1); ix + 570 pp. (vol. 2). ISBN 1-84376-429-6, $495.00 (cloth).

Edited by John Storey of Open University Business School inthe United Kingdom, The Management of Innovation (MoI) consistsof fifty-three of the most important social science works onorganizational and technological innovation. Predominantly journalarticles with some book chapters, the contents of the twin volumesare organized into nine sections that, as Storey says in hisintroduction, shift from overviews and general issues to morenarrowly focused topics. In the former category are three sections:Theoretical Perspectives and Overviews; National Systems, Diffusionand Historic Trajectories; and Business Strategy, Entrepreneurshipand Innovation. In the latter category are the remaining sixsections: Technology Strategy and New Product Development; Barriersand Enablers; Managing Innovation through     

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     

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     

Roger Horowitz. Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiii + 170 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8240-0, $35.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-8018-8241-9, $19.00 (paper).

Roger Horowitz opens Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste,Technology, Transformation with the observation that Americais a meat-eating nation. Throughout his narrative, he examinesthe forces that allow so much meat—six to eight ouncesper person per day—to satiate Americans’ appetite.The central questions driving Horowitz’s analysis are(a) what is the relationship between producing and consuminga product and (b) how does the nature of the good affect thisrelationship? In     

Tuija Mikkonen. Corporate Architecture in Finland in the 1940s and 1950s: Factory Building as Architecture, Investment and Image. Helsinki, Finland: Bookstore Tiedekirja, 2005. 269 pp. ISBN 951-41-0982-1, {euro}30.00.

As Alfred Chandler has shown in his writings, particularly thethree monographs Strategy and Structure (1962), The VisibleHand (1977), and Scale and Scope (1990), the development oflarge industrial corporations has been an important featureof society from the nineteenth century onwards. These organizationsbecame not only significant employers but also important providersof goods to consumers and to other industrial firms. Furthermore,their development has had considerable consequences for thelandscape in     

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     

The AT&T divestiture: Effect of rating changes on bond returns

As part of its divestiture agreement, AT&T was required to spin off its local exchange companies (LECs). Confronted with the task of devising ratings for the newly independent companies, Moody's and S&P published new ratings that conflicted for all 21 LECs. This study reveals that the S&P rating decision can largely be explained using a small set of historical financial variables, but these variables are not successful in explaining Moody's ratings. In addition, an examination of LEC bond returns shows that the rating-change announcements did not produce significant abnormal returns on or around the announcement dates. Apparently, most of this information had already been assimilated in bond-market prices.     

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     

Robin Pearson. Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700-1850. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004. xiii + 434 pp. ISBN 0-7546-336302, $99.95 (cloth).

Robin Pearson’s Insuring the Industrial Revolution providesa richly detailed account of the British fire insurance industrythrough the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas most previous accountshave focused on single companies, Pearson’s study encompassesthe entire industry of London and provincial firms and seeksto place the industry within the larger context of British economichistory. British economic historians have long overlooked the contributionof insurance, and service industries in general, to the nation’seconomic     

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.     

Regulation,innovation and market structure in International Telecommunications: The case of the 1956 TAT1 submarine cable

This article sets out to demonstrate how regulation, markets and technology can be intertwined. It argues that the introduction of technology in a regulated market, such as that of international telecommunications, must be seen in terms of its impact on economic and political alliances in that regulatory market. It presents a case study of the first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT1 – a joint project between the US company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), the British Post Office (GPO) and Canada's Overseas Telephone Corporation – and a coaxial cable proposed by another US company, International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). Both cables became part of a British attempt to alter existing British and US domestic regulation of international telegraph transmission.     

Michael Zakim. Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. x + 296 pp. ISBN 0-226-97793-5, $30.00 (cloth).

Michael Zakim’s Ready-Made Democracy positions men’sclothing manufacturers at the heart of the democratic and capitalistictransformations that engulfed the United States between itsfounding and the mid-nineteenth century. He argues that thehistory of the men’s suit, embodying as it does a hostof social, economic, and political relationships, presents anunequaled opportunity to observe these changes. Zakim createsa nuanced interpretation that responds to a half century ofhistoriographical debate about the nature of the market revolutionin America.