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An essay is presented on the subject of cigarette smoking among U.S. laborers in factories, corporate spying on workers, and the social culture of shopfloors in the U.S. during the 20th century. It examines the records of Erie, Pennsylvania, paper manufacturer Hammermill Paper Company concerning employee cigarette consumption, how employees attempted to evade corporate surveillance of their smoking, and labor relations in the U.S.

Provides information on the collection of the papers of Tennessee political leader Edward Hull Crump which chronicles his career and provides an opportunity to explore the lives of 20th century U.S. citizens as they negotiated the catastrophes of economic devastation and global war. Important documents housed in the Crump collection; Details of the magazine and newspaper articles that document the evolution of Crump's media image; Letters and petitions from individual citizens and neighborhood groups demanding city action included in the Crump collection.

This article examines the contracts at Warner Bros. for two productions by director Arthur Penn as a case study to consider how these agreements shaped production cultures during the emergence of New Hollywood. Through the 1950s, the studio employed production-distribution agreements that used strict controls and regulations to mimic its in-house procedures. But in the 1960s, it preferred short-form joint venture agreements that allowed more direct control in shaping the film's production while turning the producers into self-regulators. As the contracts reveal, Warner Bros. reshaped their business to grant production culture control to producers while also ensuring the studio's corporate role in the New Hollywood landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the effect of industrialization on African American families in northern Louisiana in the 1930s and 1940s, as seen in a representative father and son pair, R. D. and R. L. Belton, working in the lumber and paper industries in the small industrial town of Jonesboro. The remaining connection of such "transitional generations" to rural traditions, family networks, and survival strategies is discussed, as are changes in their education. The article takes a social history approach, seeing individual agency and collective influence in the decisions of black workers to move from the farm to the factory

A birth certificate establishes a child's legal identity and age, but few quantitative estimates of the significance of birth registration exist. Birth registration laws were enacted by U.S. states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using 1910-1930 census data, this study finds that minimum working age legislation was twice as effective in reducing under-aged employment if children had been born with a birth registration law, with positive implications for school attendance. There is some evidence that registration laws also improved the enforcement of schooling laws for younger children. A retrospective analysis with the 1960 census shows that the long-term effect of registration laws was to increase educational attainment by approximately 0.1 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the changes in the United States commercial paper market since 1980. Five-fold growth since 1979; Development of the swaps market; Growth of money market mutual funds; Changes in area of services of banks to the commercial paper market; Sources of growth in the 1980s; Movements in interest rates; Economic expansion.

Part book and part toy, the 1905 "The House That Glue Built" gave young readers an opportunity to cut and paste paper objects into rooms found within the book's pages. Its Arts and Crafts design was a novel departure from other Glue Books at the turn of the twentieth century, and a sophisticated marketing agenda by publisher Frederick A. Stokes helped propel its success. This article examines "The House that Glue Built "as book, object, and toy and traces its evolution within the publishing world from concept to international best seller, becoming the cornerstone of the seventeen-volume Glue Series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume 1: Called to Serve, January 1929-June 1951,' edited by Clayborne Carson et al.

In the 1940s and 1950s, institutionalist economists rapidly lost their influence over American economics. In parallel, a new mainstream emerged, and the institutionalists were extremely dissatisfied with the path taken by the economic science. We analyze the opinions and feelings about this context to shed light on the institutionalists’ understanding of the new mainstream economics. We construct a historical account of the institutionalists’ dissatisfaction with post-war economics based on archival material from the personal papers of Allan Gruchy, John Gambs, John Blair, and Clarence Ayres. In the period analyzed, the economists, who would later found the Association for Evolutionary Economics, acted as dissenters rather than institutionalists. In part, this explains the pluralistic path that the association has followed ever since its foundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand, entry, and political affiliation choice in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. We use a combination of estimation and calibration to identify the model's parameters from novel data on newspaper circulation, costs, and revenues. The estimated model implies that competition enhances ideological diversity, that the market undersupplies diversity, and that optimal competition policy requires accounting for the two-sidedness of the news market. (JEL D72, K21, L13, L41, L82, N42, N72) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 1978, the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panthers, began a collaboration exploring the evolution of self-deception. Together they published a brief paper that used their ideas about the naturalistic basis of deceit and self-deception to explain the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 in Washington, D.C. Given the continued power of the naturalistic fallacy in the modern life sciences, historical attention typically focuses on highly visible controversies with great popular traction. This essay instead mobilizes the muted legacy of Trivers and Newton's publication to underscore the inherent difficulties scientists face in finding a receptive audience for their theories, even naturalistic ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convenience is an important factor for people in daily activities particularly for users who consume goods and services and also for retailers who provide such services. The retail industry took infant steps in the early 20th century across most of Europe and America. However, there was a considerable surge in the rise of supermarkets and hypermarkets in 2nd half of the century as they provided a convenient all-in-one-stop experience for customers. This subsequently created a huge growth of data in retail stores which presented a challenge for store owners to interpret with traditional business intelligence tools. Therefore, there was a need for real-time analytic tools to handle large datasets in sizes of up to Terabyte magnitudes. Query languages such as Hive and Pig became prominent in the analysis of customer data to ensure continued convenient experience for customers and quality provision of services for retailers. In this paper we analyze the underlying factors that have made Hive to be effective for the retail industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies U.S. inflation adjustment speed to aggregate technology shocks and to monetary policy shocks in a medium size Bayesian vector autoregression model. According to the model estimated on the 1959-2007 sample, inflation adjusts much faster to aggregate technology shocks than to monetary policy shocks. These results are robust to different identification assumptions and measures of aggregate prices. However, by separately estimating the model over the pre- and post-1980 periods, this paper further shows that inflation adjusts much faster to technology shocks than to monetary policy shocks in the post-1980 period, but not in the pre-1980 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through 1975, the shareholder annual reports of publicly-owned U.S. railroads were exempt from the Securities and Exchange Commission's accounting regulations, audit and disclosure rules because railroads were common carriers subject to the rules and regulations of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). Publicly-owned Class railroads voluntary began to away from ICC-type towards GAAP-type accounting and disclosures in their shareholder reports just after World War II.1 This paper reviews early industry practices with respect to internal and external audits. Using a sample of major Class I railroads from 1946 to 1975, the paper shows: the extent to which certain railroads voluntarily presented audited financial statements before being required, the extent to which particular CPA firms were involved with the railroad industry, and the types of audit reports that issued to these railroads during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world appears to be moving into a new era of international migration during which gaps between policies needed to manage migratory flows and those enacted in practice will widen. Whereas immigrants in the late 20th century were motivated by a desire to improve their wellbeing by accessing opportunities in richer countries, in the early 21st century they are increasingly motivated by a desire to escape threats at places of origin, yielding very different patterns of migration and selectivity. Using the United States as an example, this paper reviews how mismatches between the underlying realities of international migration and the policies adopted to manage them, in both eras have produced and continue to produce dysfunctional outcomes. Although deleterious policy outcomes might be avoided in the future by combining a well-grounded conceptual understanding of the forces producing immigration with a clear statement of the goals to be achieved through specific policy interventions, the avoidance of further dysfunctional outcomes is unlikely to be achieved in an age of rising populism, disinformation, and xenophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed a significant transformation in managerial control practices within the US department store. New principles of scientific management, already employed on the factory floor, were now implemented on the retail "shop floor": The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into this transition by examining three such scientific management initiatives introduced by store management during this era. The paper draws on a number of sources in its historical examination of early department store scientific management initiatives. These include archival records, published literature of the era, and particularly the proceedings of meetings of the annual Controllers Congress of the National Retail Dry Goods Association (US). The paper finds how notions of the rationality of science reined over such store operations as inventory valuation, credit control and overhead expense allocation. Traditional positions of power were recast and new managerial roles created in the name of science. The paper illustrates the insights that can be gained from an examination of scientific management practices in an alternative arena to the factory floor. Further historical research in the area of retail management may rove productive not only for our understanding of this site but also our knowledge of the process by which new managerial initiatives become assimilated The study of the managerial practices of such vast organizational forms proves fruitful not only for the history scholar. Given the centrality of the department store in the creation of a contemporary culture of consumption, such examination becomes all the more insightfuL [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the twentieth century consensus became the language through which scientists and other experts spoke truth to power and provided expert advice for policy making. Historical scholarship on science policy has acknowledged this trend but has not explained how consensus came to play such a large role in the relationship between experts and policy makers. This paper examines two historical case studies from the mid-twentieth century in which consensus was introduced--the failed consensus report experiments of the American Economic Association and the successful establishment of the National Research Council's consensus studies. These examples demonstrate that consensus was not a natural or obvious choice. Rather, the choice was driven by the growth and definition of the postwar scientific community and its negotiated relationship to the Cold War national security state. In this context, consensus became associated with depersonalized and objective knowledge. As it reinforces the notion of a divide between science and politics, consensus has remained an instrumental part of the relationship between the NRC and its patrons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The melting pot metaphor, which imagines the United States as a cultural and social force of assimilation, has maintained a stronghold in the ideologies surrounding immigration since the metaphor emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. However, it is important to realize that the melting pot metaphor frames immigration according to certain ideologies and identities, a rhetorical function that bears real consequences for immigrants in the United States. In this paper, I use Kenneth Burke’s theory of god-terms to position the melting pot metaphor as a god-term that disguises the challenges, issues, and discriminations many immigrants endure in the United States. After describing how three interpretations of the melting pot metaphor perpetuate alternative perspectives on immigration, I advocate that individuals question, examine, and seek out meaning from the melting pot metaphor each time it is written or spoken in order to gain a greater capacity for listening and understanding in contemporary immigration discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1946 General Dwight Eisenhower, the Army Chief of Staff, established the Research and Development (R&D) Division on the War Department General Staff to expedite major technological breakthroughs in weapons technology. This goal, based on the separation of the management of R&D from procurement, captured the Army's preference for qualitative rather than quantitative superiority on the battlefield, but it threatened to upend entrenched methods of incremental product improvement under way in the Army's supply organizations, collectively called the technical services. The division's brief existence (it ceased operations in 1947) contrasted sharply with the longevity of the Ordnance Department's in-house manufacturing arsenals; for more than a century they had exploited synergies between R&D and production to turn out new weapons mass-produced in industry. The history of the R&D Division and the corresponding management of technological innovation in the technical services broadens an otherwise narrow historiographical interpretation of postwar knowledge production in the United States that is still focused heavily on the moral and political economy of military-funded academic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the history of refereeing at specialist scientific journals and at funding bodies and shows that it was only in the late twentieth century that peer review came to be seen as a process central to scientific practice. Throughout the nineteenth century and into much of the twentieth, external referee reports were considered an optional part of journal editing or grant making. The idea that refereeing is a requirement for scientific legitimacy seems to have arisen first in the Cold War United States. In the 1970s, in the wake of a series of attacks on scientific funding, American scientists faced a dilemma: there was increasing pressure for science to be accountable to those who funded it, but scientists wanted to ensure their continuing influence over funding decisions. Scientists and their supporters cast expert refereeing—or “peer review,” as it was increasingly called—as the crucial process that ensured the credibility of science as a whole. Taking funding decisions out of expert hands, they argued, would be a corruption of science itself. This public elevation of peer review both reinforced and spread the belief that only peer-reviewed science was scientifically legitimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the question of whether economic factors played an important role in determining strike activity in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. A review of recent research shows one author, David Snyder, concluding that economic factors mattered little during that period and that union organization and political variables explained much more; and another, P. K. Edwards, concluding the opposite. A retest of these authors' analyses, employing ordinary least squares regression and a variety of measures, suggests that Snyder's position is more sound. This author argues, however, that Edwards was correct in claiming that economic factors are major determinants of the extent of unionism as well as of strike activity, and thus one needs to apply a two-stage least squares test of the Snyder hypothesis. When that is done, the results show that economic variables are highly significant determinants of strike activity throughout the pre-1949 period, but for the subperiod 1921 - 29 noneconomic factors also play a role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to make the readers acquainted with the realities of the twentieth century American family, as perceived by the two American playwrights, and, on the other hand, to underline the unusual phenomena that have been brought by the changing dynamics of the family relationships. All the five plays under discussion-All Over, A Delicate Balance, The American Dream, The Sandbox by Edward Albee, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad by Arthur Kopit - present situations in which the female characters seem to have become the leader, taking the place of the head of the family, of the pater familias. They stop acting like loving mothers and wives, they forget to take care of their families; instead, they lock away their hearts and assume the part of some sort of tyrant: they control everyone and everything in the house, their word being the equivalent of a rule. The female characters are endowed with masculine traits, whereas the male characters are emasculated, effeminate, deprived of any kind of power. The purpose of the paper is to demystify the myth of the ideal, perfect American family, to make the readers realize that the image that has been presented to the non-American public is, in the twentieth century, nothing but a disguise. Our goal is to display the image of the new American family hoping that, in doing so, we will succeed in making the readers realize the fact that human relationships, especially the ones within the family, need to be re-established on a deeper and more meaningful level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers some of the large changes in the Federal Reserve's approach to monetary policy. It shows that, in some important cases, critics who were successful in arguing that past Fed approaches were responsible for mistakes that caused harm succeeded in making the Fed averse to these approaches. This can explain why the Fed stopped basing monetary policy on the quality of new bank loans, why it stopped being willing to cause recessions to deal with inflation, and why it was temporarily unwilling to maintain stable interest rates in the period 1979-1982. It can also contribute to explaining why monetary policy was tight during the Great Depression. The paper shows that the evolution of policy was much more gradual and flexible after the Volcker disinflation, when the Fed was not generally deemed to have made an error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between immigrants' genetic diversity and economic development in the United States during the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a period commonly referred to as the age of mass migration from Europe to the New World. Our panel model estimates show that during this period, immigrants' genetic diversity is significantly positively correlated with measures of U.S. counties' economic development. There exists also a significant positive relationship between immigrants' genetic diversity in 1870 and contemporaneous measures of U.S. counties' average income. (JEL J11, O51, Z13) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the early 1990s, accounts of classical American philosophy paid relatively little attention to the work and intellectual contributions of women philosophers. However, as early as 1991, a number of contemporary feminist philosophers and historians began to devote more focused attention to women philosophers whose intellectual achievements had been marginalized or forgotten. One woman philosopher whose contributions have still gone unnoticed is that of American logician, mathematician, and color theorist Christine Ladd-Franklin. This paper argues that Ladd-Franklin's feminist efforts to increase the opportunities for women in professional academia were influenced not only by her work as a woman scientist and her reading of feminist literature but also by her understanding of pragmatism and her interaction with Charles Peirce. Specifically, Ladd-Franklin's arguments to increase academic research positions for women and her criticisms of male-only scientific societies (i) point out how discrimination on the basis of gender violates Peirce's first rule of reason that one ought not block the road to inquiry and (ii) expose the unscientific nature of gender discrimination by contrasting the pragmatic meaning of acquiring a doctorate with the institutional practice of barring women from making intellectual contributions by denying them professorial positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American reaction to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 is always portrayed as one of shock and horror. Yet there has been no systematic study of the subject. This article examines American public at the time from the outbreak of war in August 1914 through the congressional elections of November 1914, through the medium of newspaper and journal writing. The picture that emerges is that the American population, far from being shocked and horrified, was excited and fascinated by the idea of a war in Europe. Moreover, the most widely shared sentiment was one of satisfaction at the economic opportunity presented by the war, as it was seen as being very much in American economic interest. This article also includes the present discussion among political scientists and strategic thinkers about the American public and its reaction to war in general, to provide different models by which to examine American behavior in 1914. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the tumultuous relationship between the World Bank and the U.S. government during the seventies. Drawing on previously untapped documents from the bank archives, it details the rise of U.S. opposition to the bank in the seventies and describes the resistance by the bank’s president, former U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara, to American efforts to influence the organization during the time. A study of the bank’s relationship with Chile in the early seventies demonstrates how the organization’s behavior was guided as much by internal factors—in this case a desire to maintain its creditworthiness—as it was the result of pressure from the U.S. government. Nevertheless, the article concludes that U.S. support remained critical to the bank and, as such, the organization’s autonomy was significantly bounded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an historical narrative about the role business and entrepreneurship has played in global development. It starts off with some of the key legacies of the 19th century and describes events through the 20th century in chronological order up until the first decade of this millennium. The paper concludes by peering into the future through the extrapolation of events that have taken place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]