Uneeda Business History: the Nabisco Story
At 7 PM Central Time on Tuesday August 25 and Wednesday August 26 I am offering a two-part course in Entrepreneurial Thinking. Each session will last 90 minutes to allow plentiful discussion and Q&A.We need entrepreneurial thinkers in all walks of life: in...
Our Great Department Stores 47 Years Ago
At 7 PM Central Time on Tuesday August 25 and Wednesday August 26 I am offering a two-part Zoom course in Entrepreneurial Thinking.Each session will last 90 minutes to allow plentiful discussion and Q&A.Topics wil include:How entrepreneurs think differently and...
The Rise and Consolidation of Industries: Airlines
Most observers of the industrial structure of the United States have noted the consolidation of industries, with one giant buying another. Many industries begin an early industry phase of new entrants, with many competitors, followed by a shakeout or a gradual...
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...
Music for the Millions: The Wurlitzer Story
Originally published Dec 5, 2020. You can listen to the 18 minute audio version of this post here. Rudolph Wurlitzer and his sons Howard and Farny Wurlitzer The Wurlitzer Company is one of the most interesting companies we have studied. At their peak, their...
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...
Whatever Became of International Harvester?
You can listen to the 9 minute audio version of this post here. Originally published October 2019. With this newsletter, we begin a periodic series, “Whatever Became of?” As students of business history, we learn much from both success and failure. About 80% of the...
The Business History of Woodstock
Originally published August 2019. You can listen to the 7 minute audio version of this post here. Too often, when we see great entertainment or a great event, we forget that someone had to dream it up, organize it, and finance it. Fifty years ago this month,...
The Unsung Story of the Greatest Industrial Designer
Originally published November 2019. Outside of the field of product and transportation design, too few people know who Raymond Loewy was. The best-known industrial designer, founder of the industrial design profession, and member of the pantheon of our greatest...
The Rise and Fall of Big Boy Hamburgers
Originally published on May 22, 2022. Few industries touch our daily lives more than the restaurant business. Serving food to friends and neighbors is the most basic form of capitalism, found in every village on earth. Sharing food and dining experiences, from...
How Baking Powder Changed the World of Horse Racing and Auto Racing
Originally published on May 25, 2019. We have updated the content to April 2026. At the American Business History Center, we are always looking for ways to connect the present to the past. And hopefully learn some lessons along the way. May is a critical month...
From Hero to Hated: America’s Most Tragic Entrepreneur
Originally published January 2021. Few business leaders or entrepreneurs in American history have done more to enable progress and prosperity than Samuel Insull, a name little known today. Yet eighty years ago, he was one of the most famous people in America and...
Tech Wars: RCA and the Television Industry
Originally published Feb 5, 2021. From the telegraph to the modern age, high technology has seen continuous innovation, followed by the rise of numerous competitors, then consolidation into fewer companies, and finally decline. Here is one of our favorite...
The Short Story of How ABC TV Helped Create Disneyland
Originally published Feb 28, 2020 Here is a quick note on an interesting twist in American business history. In 1948, the federal government trustbusters decreed that the big movie studios should not own movie theaters. In the preceding twenty years, the...
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...
Americans Heading to Mid-sized Cities in the 21st Century
Three years ago, we did a study of the 21st century growth of American metropolitan and micropolitan areas by size of the metro and by region of the US. The growth in medium sized metros, which include all the suburbs of a city, has continued since then. ...
Forgotten Empire Builders: Cleveland’s Van Sweringen Brothers
Originally published May 29, 2020. This week we present another very brief “bullet point biography.” A classic story of shattered dreams. At the American Business History Center, we focus our energies on those companies (and their founders and leaders) which...
Big Brands at the Grocery Store a Century Ago 1925
Today we take a stroll through a grocery or drug store in 1925, to see which brands and companies were strongest a century ago. Some companies and brands lasted through today, many did not! What were great-great-great grandpa and grandma’s favorite products,...
A Century of Automobile Industry History in Charts
Please read the note at the end of this post about our use of AI to generate the visuals and information in the post. AI is getting better but it is not perfect. We made every effort to ensure that these graphics and data tell the correct overall story...
Evolution: Hotel and Restaurant Companies Fifty Years Ago
Originally published on Jan 23, 2020. Since this article was published, we have written up the history of the Marriott company and founder, and the most interesting story of Best Western, which is a non-profit co-op of sorts. Few industries are more fascinating than...
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;...
Forgotten Giant: General Foods
Originally published October 23, 2020. For decades America’s largest food company, General Foods was one of the most highly regarded marketing companies in the world. Formed in the roaring twenties by consolidating companies that led the way in convenience...
My New Year’s Resolution: to Avoid Seeing the World Through Two Flawed Lenses
Today, something completely different that I hope will help you enter 2026 with a strong mindset and optimism about the future. While I no longer have over 50,000 books, my personal philosophies remain intact, as indicated in this New Year’s post I wrote on my...
American Visionary: Daniel Hudson Burnham
Here is our Holiday gift to you … a new full-length biography of a great American! Originally published on December 22, 2025 by the Archbridge Institute. “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized....
Gimbel Brothers Department Stores: Dust to Dust
Originally published July 16, 2021. The retailing industry is a continuous story of the rise and fall of companies. No enterprise stays on top forever in this highly competitive field that touches our lives every day. Today we look at a company, now long...
For History Lovers: The Deep Roots of Business
Originally published March 12, 2020 Entrepreneurship and business are at the core of modern life. Both have given us many great innovations and improvements in life and prosperity. We at the American Business History Center understandably focus our efforts on the...
Forgotten Industrial Giant: The Allis-Chalmers Story
Originally published May 22, 2020. Our business history articles often focus on the consumer products and services industries with which we all interact – from auto companies to department stores. Yet it’s important not to forget the industrial companies that...
The Little Soft Drink That Could: The Pepsi Story
Originally published Feb 14, 2020. Happy Valentine’s Day! Here is a sweet story of candy and soda pop, and of incredible persistence which overcame failure and controversy. Caleb Bradham In 1893, young Caleb Bradham bought the drugstore at the corner of Middle...
The Non-Profit Where the World Sleeps: Best Western
Originally published May 8, 2020. The lodging industry is one of the oldest industries on earth, and one of the most important. No one can do business, trade, spread ideas, practice diplomacy, explore the world, or migrate without temporary lodgings. From the...
The Tortuous Saga of the First Wonder Drug: Aspirin
Originally published Apr 3, 2020 Ancient Remedies The Mesopotamian Ur III tablet, dating from about 3500 BC, mentions the willow tree (Salix in Latin) as a medicinal remedy. Centuries later, additional references are found in Egyptian papyrus...
Who Makes Our Balls?
Originally published June 4, 2020 In these troubling times, it’s important to remember something called “fun.” Our weekly newsletters tend to cover big industries like retailing and automobiles. But we also find smaller, niche industries fascinating. Here is a...
Office Machines, Forerunners of the Computer
Originally published January 7, 2021 Welcome to 2021! In 2020, our first full calendar year of operation, these American Business History newsletters have been read over 90,000 times. The number of pages viewed on our website rose from 1,500 per month at...
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...
The Tragic Story of the Fox in Fox Network and Fox News
Originally published January 31, 2020. Fox News and the Fox Network have become part of the daily lives of millions. Yet few know where the name “Fox” came from, other than the historic Twentieth Century-Fox Studios. That movie-making part of the Fox empire was...
Mountain-Moving Monster Machines from Milwaukee: the Bucyrus-Erie Story
For millennia, humans have invented and produced tools and machines to make life easier. It has been a long journey from the wheel and lever to iPhones and SpaceX. Along the way, pioneering engineers have designed some of the largest machines ever built...
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...
Supermarket: One of the Most Important (and least known) American Inventions of All Time
Originally published August 2019. Updated September 2025. This Sunday, August 4, is the 89th anniversary of a huge innovation with a global, lasting impact – the supermarket. On August 4, 1930, Michael Cullen opened his “huge” King Kullen store in the...
How Chattanooga Brought Coca-Cola to the World
Originally published Aug 7, 2020 and updated September 2025. Here is an unsung but key part of the long and illustrious history of Coca-Cola, one of the world’s most successful and well-known brands. Few realize the links between the company and the patent...
Moving through Chicago: The Parmelee Transportation Story
These days we race from gate to gate between planes or grab an Uber with a touch on a phone. Yet, for over a century, any well-travelled American was a customer of Chicago’s Parmelee Transportation Company, which also served other cities including New York City. ...
Jeep: The Little Brand That Could
Originally published June 3, 2019. Updated August 2025. Earlier this week, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (“FCA”), technically a Dutch Company, proposed a marriage with the seriously-French automaker Renault. Initial investor reaction to the marriage was...
The World’s Largest Companies in 2024 … and in the Past
Five years ago, we took a look at the biggest companies in the world. Today we update that look with a few tables, based on the data provided in the annual Fortune magazine Global 500 lists. You can see the shift from a US-centered (and to some degree European)...
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...
In the Headlines: Historic Railroad Mergers
Four years ago we published a history of the American railroad system, showing how mergers had reshaped the industry in the late 20th century and beyond. That article contains maps and illustrations that bring life to this story. At that time, we concluded...
The Birthing of a New (Distribution) Technology: the Discount Store
Few subjects are more interesting than the evolution of innovations and new technologies. When a new idea catches fire, new enterprises enter the fray. Then there is a shakeout, with many of the early movers dying. Then there may be additional...
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...
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