A Visual Tour of American Architecture
(Photo above: Guardian Building, Detroit, Michigan) Originally published Aug 23, 2022 America’s great skyscrapers, museums, hotels, train stations, churches, and other structures reflect the ambitions and dreams of our society. Funded by the wealth generated by...
Which US Companies Have Created the Most Jobs?
This week, our annual update of the companies which employed the most people last year, on our chart which shows the changes since 1994. Two companies dominate the list to a degree that was not happening before this chart started in 1994. The newcomer is...
Which US Companies Made the Most Profit in 2025?
This week, our annual update of the companies which made the most money last year, on our chart which shows the changes since 1994. This chart is much more volatile than our charts on top revenue and top market capitalization companies. The Big Tech companies here are...
Most Valuable American Companies over 31 Years: 1995-2026
In this year’s annual update of our chart of the most valuable companies, see the absolute dominance of Big Tech at the top, a repeat of last year. For more comments and historical perspective, see last year’s article. Watch on Youtube here:...
Largest American Companies 1994-2025
Audio Version of this Post can be found here Errata: In the audio file and transcript, I said JPMorgan had 40 billion dollars in assets, but they have 4 trillion! As someone who has been studying this stuff for over 60 years, I still have trouble thinking in...
Beyond Wall Street: Great Family Businesses
You can listen to the 9 minute audio version of this post here.Originally published June 2020. Updated for 2026. America has hundreds of thousands of privately-held, family-owned businesses. Thousands of them are large. The list of the largest ones is...
A Nobel for the Deep Roots of Growth and Prosperity
Today we present an excellent recent article by our Board member and finance wizard, Larry Siegel, on economic history and a top economic historian who just won a Nobel Prize. Originally published in Advisor Perspectives, February 2, 2026. Read more of Larry’s great...
Giant Companies Rarely Survive
Originally published on Apr 1, 2021. A careful study of this week’s list will show you the huge American industries which once dominated stock markets, employment, and community life, but which are not as important in the age of Amazon and Google. Our readers know we...
The Three Greatest American Companies of All Time
Originally published on Oct 9, 2020. We wrote this five years ago, before the American Business History Center was founded, but we stand by our choices. For the last 52 years, I have been obsessed with understanding what makes a company great. What leads to success;...
Henry J. Kaiser: California Dreamer, Workers’ Friend
This article first appeared on June 24, 2019 in The Archbridge Institute’s ‘American Originals’ series. Despite being often forgotten today, Henry J. Kaiser was one of the most unusual and diverse entrepreneurs in American history. Quitting school at the age of...
Superwealth: A Historical Perspective
Originally published May 6, 2021 Few business subjects fascinate people as much as the very wealthy. Our obsession with celebrity goes back centuries but seems to have accelerated in recent decades. Forbes produced its first list of the richest Americans...
New Beginnings in the Roaring Twenties
Originally published January 9, 2020 Here we go again – another decade of the “twenties” – hopefully these twenties roar in the good sense. This is a perfect time to look back at what was going on in business history one hundred years ago. 1920 was an...
The Largest American Corporate Employers 1994-2024
Today we publish the last of our series of four annual animated charts on the top American public companies, focused on the largest employers. This list may seem to change more gradually than our prior lists based on revenues, stock market valuations, and...
Highest Profit American Companies: 1994-2024
In our last article, we presented a history and chart on the most valuable companies in America over the past three decades. In this issue, we take a look at another interesting measure, the twenty American companies that made the highest annual dollar profits...
Most Valuable American Companies over 30 Years: 1995-2025
In our last article, we presented a history and chart on the largest companies in America over the past three decades. In this issue, we take a look at another interesting measure, the twenty most valuable American companies over the same time span, based on the...
Largest American Companies over 30 Years: 1994-2024
In the paragraphs below, we take a visual tour of the evolution of the largest American companies over the past thirty years. We’ve posted updates of our annual charts of America’s biggest companies from the recently published Fortune 500. The first chart shows the...
Most Valuable American Companies 1995-2024
Here we continue with our series of annual updates on America’s biggest companies from the recently published Fortune 500. This chart shows the 20 US public companies with the largest market capitalizations from 1995 through 2024. You can pause and move to...
Largest American Employers 1994-2023
Here we continue with our series of annual updates on America’s biggest companies. This chart shows the 20 biggest employers among US public companies from 1994 through 2023. You can pause and move to any year between 1994 and 2023. (There is also a...
Highest Profit US Companies 1994-2023
Here we continue with our series of annual updates on America’s biggest companies. This chart shows the 20 highest profit US public companies from 1994 through 2023. You can pause and move to any year between 1994 and 2023. (There is also a video...
Largest US Companies 1994-2023
We’re delighted to present our annual update of our charts on the largest American companies, ranked by revenue, reflecting full year results for 2023. Here are two charts which you can pause and move to any year between 1994 and 2023. One chart is the top...
Understanding How Business Works, with Book Recommendations
I am often surprised how many entrepreneurs, and even folks with MBA degrees, don’t fully understand how big business really works, how company leaders think, and how companies strategize and compete. One of the best ways to understand all this is to study the...
Why Should We Study Business History?
This article was originally published by the Discourse Magazine. Great scientists learn from and build upon what has gone before them. Similarly, attorneys make their careers by studying precedent and the legal cases of the past. Military leaders still study...
The Simple Key to Breakthrough Innovation
History lovers, I have been busy rebuilding my life and my library since my house burned down a year ago. I’ve spent some time on writing longer biographical articles, such as our recent story on Sam Walton and Walmart. I hope to get back to...
Whole Foods Founder Begins a New Adventure
Whole Foods Founder Begins a New Adventure At the American Business History Center, we rarely comment on current events or living entrepreneurs. At the same time, our study of the lessons of the past is motivated by our desire to understand the present and the...
Seeing Change Through History’s Lens
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards” – Steve Jobs The American Business History Center wishes happy holidays to all of our readers. As another year comes to a close, it’s a great time to think back over time,...
How to be Visionary: First Principles & Learning from History
Today I write a more personal note, which we don’t often do in these newsletters. My lifelong study of businesses, working in them and starting them, has led me to think about how one sees the future clearly. The many great business leaders we profile on...
Six Simple Steps to Building A Great Lasting Company
One of our key goals at the American Business History Center is to learn lessons from the successes and failures of the past. In most of our weekly articles, we leave it to our readers to draw their own lessons, although we occasionally touch on what can be...
Two Books: The American West and Business History
July 9 is the deadline for our high school essay contest, with $7500 in prizes, including $3000 for the best essay. PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD! …. and, by the way, this is the 100th issue of our free weekly newsletter! Today we recommend two books for our fellow...
Business History on the Rise
On May 8, 2019, two years ago, four of us launched the American Business History Center. As enumerated below, we are pleased with the growth of our weekly newsletter and our website traffic (shown above). Your donations have helped us continue our work and will help...
Americans Vote with Their Feet
Last week, the Census Bureau published their annual estimates of population, as of July 1, 2020. Population trends underly all economic activity, so we study that data as soon as it is released. The fastest growing and shrinking cities and metropolitan areas...
Success Lost & Found: Sherwin-Williams
While most big companies disappear over time (as shown in our recent newsletter), some figure out how to survive and prosper decade after decade, even century after century. But is the journey from founding to long-term durability a straight path? Today...
Big Rich, Big News, & A Short Book
Big Rich Forbes magazine just released their annual list of the richest people in the world, topped by Jeff Bezos at $177 billion and Elon Musk at $151 billion. Computer scientist and founder of the incubator Y Combinator Paul Graham has written an excellent...
Bye Bye, New York
One of the most significant shifts in American business over the last several decades has been the shrinking number of big corporations headquartered in New York City. At first, some moved “upstate” to the New York suburbs and to Connecticut. But more...
Forgotten Business Giant: Charles M. Schwab
We are all familiar with the visionary entrepreneur Charles R. Schwab who pioneered the discount stock brokerage industry in the 1970s. But almost no one remembers the unrelated Charles M. Schwab, one of the most important business leaders in American history....
The Biggest Companies in the World
Fifty-seven years ago, meatpacking giant Swift was the 15th largest public company in the world. Today that 15th spot is held by American health insurer UnitedHealth. Apple sits in the 12th position formerly held by Texaco, now part of Chevron. ...
Business Stories 90 Years Ago
Fortune Magazine, the Wonder of the 1930s In February 1930, the greatest American magazine publisher, Harry Luce, produced the first issue of Fortune magazine. His seven-year-old Time magazine had become a huge success. Luce and his company then created...
What If These Planned Mergers Had Happened?
Mergers and acquisitions have been common throughout business history. Three major waves were particularly important: the building of the trusts, trying to dominate each industry, in the 1890s; another round of industry consolidations in the roaring 1920s; and...
Most Valuable Companies: The Last 25 Years
An updated 2024 version of this chart can be seen here. On Market Capitalization as a Measure of Size or Success Your history reporter has been studying big business for fifty-seven years (I started subscribing to Fortune magazine in 1963, when I was twelve years...
Big Companies Hiring (and Laying Off) Employees
An updated 2022 version of this chart can be seen here. This week we present another of our animated charts based on Fortune magazine’s annual lists of the 500 largest US public companies (based on revenues). This time, our focus is on the largest employers...
Dinosaur Age: Charting Giant Companies 66 Years Ago
“Last week we brought you an unprecedented animated chart of the Fortune 500 list since 1994. Here we go back another 40 years, when steel companies and meatpackers were still giants. Taken together, you can learn a lot from 65 years of history.” Last...
25 Years of the Fortune 500 Animated Chart
An updated 2022 version of this chart can be seen here. The saga of American business in one chart! The fall of Enron, the rise of Apple and Amazon, the enduring legacy of John Rockefeller in Exxon and Chevron – see the years fly by! Below the two charts...
Lessons from 21 Amazing American Originals
This article first appeared in the Archbridge Institute’s American Originals Series. Over the last two-and-one-half years, we at the American Business History Center, in conjunction with the Archbridge Institute, have written and published...24 years of Big Company Change
The rise, fall, and disappearance of America’s largest companies tells us much about business and our economy. Since 1955, Fortune magazine has published a list of the 500 largest U.S. companies, ranked by sales (revenues). Until 1995, this list only included...The Rise and Fall of American Cities
History lovers, Today we present something a little different….an animated chart showing the rise and fall of American cities. If you play (or replay) the graphic linked here, you will see the rise and fall of the thirty most populous metropolitan areas in the...
101 Years of Business Success and Survival
Join others around the country who have donated $9,000. Thank you! Donate today .Management and strategy thinkers continually try to understand what makes for success and failure. Why do some companies stand the test of time, while others disappear into the...
An Organizational Idea That Might Help Your Enterprise – or Your University
There have been many great two-person leadership teams in the annals of business history. My favorite might be Walt and Roy Disney, two brothers who laid the foundation for one of the world’s greatest and most beneficial enterprises. Walt was the...
Built to Last — or not? Beware of what you read!
Originally published on Hooversworld.com on July 28, 2016 I was working on a newsletter about Melville Shoe, a retailer I covered as a securities analyst at Citibank in the mid-70s. It was a great company with some unique approaches to opportunity discovery,...
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