Magnanimous Merchant: Julius Rosenwald
This article first appeared in the Archbridge Institute’s American Originals Series.\ In this American Originals series, we’ve recounted the life stories of men and women who created great inventions and enterprises. None of them had more energy and drive than the shy...
The Wonders of Chain Stores and Franchises
This article was originally published by the Archbridge Institute. I often hear people say that they dislike chain stores or chain restaurants, “big box” stores, or franchises. America has long had a love-hate relationship with the big chains. Understanding the...
Back to School! Expand Your Mind with Peter Drucker and History: Automobiles, Airlines, Computers, and Retailing
Autumn is the time many Americans put on their thinking caps and start learning again, after a summer break. So we’re offering zoom courses with Gary Hoover. We are excited to add new industry-specific, very affordable classes on the automobile, airline,...
A Visual Tour of American Architecture
(Photo above: Guardian Building, Detroit, Michigan) 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 our economic system, they are...
Learn from History’s Great Innovators!
For four successive Tuesday evenings, starting August 23, I will moderate small group Zoom discussions about some of the most important entrepreneurs and innovators in American business history. This series follows our successful Great Leaders course which...
America’s Largest Hotels through Time
The world couldn’t function without the lodging industry. Wayside inns for the traveler have been with us for centuries. The American West was built on stagecoach stops and hotels near the train depot. Today, most Americans have experienced hotels and motels,...
Largest Employers 1994-2021
This week we present our animated chart of the largest employers in America among our big, public companies. In the last three weeks, we have published similar charts based on revenues, on profits, and on market capitalization, all of which can be found by clicking...
Most Valuable U.S. Companies 1995 Through 2022
Two years ago, we created animated charts showing the change in America’s largest companies, first by size (revenues), then by profits, market capitalizations, and number of employees. The new Fortune magazine “Fortune 500” list of the biggest public companies...
Highest Profit US Companies 1994 Through 2021
(Our original post listed this as the 25 highest profit companies but should have said 20 highest profit companies.) Two years ago, we created animated charts showing the change in America’s largest companies, first by size (revenues), then by profits, market...
2022 UPDATED Largest Companies Charts
Two years ago, we created animated charts showing the change in America’s largest companies, first by size (revenues), then by profits, market capitalizations, and number of employees. The new Fortune magazine “Fortune 500” list of the biggest public companies...
New “Lessons of the Greats” Zoom Course
We’re introducing two short zoom courses in which we explore the lessons we can learn from great business leaders and innovators. Each of the two courses consists of four successive Tuesday evening 90-minute sessions, led by me, Gary Hoover. The first...
The Rise and Fall of Big Boy Hamburgers
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 ballpark hotdogs to the finest...
Americans Leaving Older Cities for Greener Pastures
In the twelve months ended on July 1, 2021, Dallas-Fort Worth and their suburbs attracted almost 75,000 people from around America, while the greater San Francisco Bay area witnessed more than 170,000 folks running to other parts of the country. These population...
Learning History Through Advertising and Design: The Airlines
We can learn much about the history and evolution of technology, business, geography, fashions, and design by studying the advertising materials of companies. The passenger transportation industries have produced some of the most vivid posters, ads, and...
From Dog Dung to Plexiglas: the Rohm and Haas Story
Few industries are more important to modern life than the chemical industry. Almost everything we touch, the clothes we wear, and much of what we eat contains chemicals or was processed by chemicals. Yet the companies are usually out of sight of...
Drucker Zoom Study Group with Gary Hoover: 8-Week Course Limited to 9 Participants
SOLD OUT Do you want to engage in a serious discussion about the purpose of business and the roles of leaders and managers? Do you want to expand your understanding by studying the ideas of the great business thinker, Peter Drucker? No scholar or professor of...
A Tale of Entrepreneurial Failure: TravelFest Austin Part Two
If you read Part One of this story, published in our last newsletter, you know that TravelFest was an immediate success with customers. The store was not big enough to handle the traffic, so we decided to build larger stores. The original 6,000 square foot...
A Tale of Entrepreneurial Failure: TravelFest Austin: Part One
Read the second part of this two-part story here. Two years ago, we started our “Share Your History” page on our website. We solicited contributions from our readers, telling us of their history with enterprises large or small. To start the page, we seeded...
Flexible Apparel Giant: VF Corporation
No industry touches us more frequently or intimately than the apparel industry. Yet few if any books document the history of this important industry. There are plentiful books about costume and fashion trends, but not about the enterprises which made the...
Not So American Anymore: Book Publishing (Part Two of Two)
Read the first part of this two-part story here. In our last newsletter, we told the story of the great publishing house Harper Brothers, founded in 1817. In this issue, we continue our story with the tale of two powerhouse book publishers that arose over 100...
Not So American Anymore: Book Publishing (Part One of Two)
Read the second part of this two-part story here. The history of book publishing in America goes back to the earliest days of the country. Thousands of book publishing companies have existed, mostly small but with an outsized impact on education, culture, and...
The Sordid Saga of Mr. Singer and his Sewing Machine
Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-1875) had a dream: to become a great actor on the stage, performing Shakespeare to accolades. For almost the first forty years of his life, he failed to achieve any success in this pursuit. Continually tinkering with machines, he...
Free Download Gift
We at the American Business History Center wish all our fans, readers, and donors a Happy New Year! We love beautiful, nostalgic images. When we published our new book Bedtime Business Stories earlier this month, we left out the great color pictures in 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,...
Our Collection of Great Business History Stories now on sale on Amazon!
Our new book is now available on Amazon for $19.95 for the paperback and $9.95 for Kindle version. There is no other book quite like it, full of diverse, short, unknown tales of business adventures (and misadventures). The many color pictures that go with...
The First Zoom Course on American Business History
Premiering our Introduction to American Business History Zoom Course The American Business History Center and Gary Hoover are pleased to introduce our first zoom course in American business history. We have been unable to unearth any other online or zoom course...
It’s Giving Tuesday! Why Support Our Work?
Here we are at Giving Tuesday! We’re sure you are inundated with messages like this today, and perhaps every day. But we sure would appreciate any contribution you might make to help us continue our work here at the American Business History Center. Each week,...
John Hertz: His Innovations Touch Millions but Few Know His Story
Sandor Herz was born in or near Vrutky, Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia) on April 10, 1879, the oldest of the six children of Jakob and Katie Herz. When he was three years old, the family emigrated to America, and by 1884, at the age of five, young Sandor (now...
Recipe for Success: The Campbell’s Story
In this week’s newsletter, we publish one of the best essays from our high school essay contest, by one of our honorable mention winners. This excellent history of the Campbell Soup Company was written by Diya Patel of Woodland Park, New Jersey. Diya...
Announcing Our Forthcoming Business History Book!
We are pleased to announce our first book, Bedtime Business Stories: Short Sagas of Business Creation, Success, and Failure. The book is our response to many reader requests for our articles in book form. It will be available for purchase next month, on Amazon...
The Greatest Businessman in American History: Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
This article first appeared in the Archbridge Institute’s American Originals Series. Many management scholars consider Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. as the greatest business leader in American history. If we exclude company founders, Sloan has few...
From Olympic Swimmer to Small Business Owner: The Tale of Calphin
American business and entrepreneurial energy extends to every industry. Many great businesses have been created by immigrants from around the globe. The excellent company history below, which won third prize in our Essay Contest for High School students,...
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...
A Family of Brands in a Family Business: The Story of National Safety Apparel
This week we proudly present another one of the top essays submitted by high school students. You can see that we had many great essays and picking the top ones was difficult. This essay won our second highest prize. Gary Hoover Executive Director...
Why Cars Don’t Have to be Black
Henry Ford was happy to sell you a Model T in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Yet few know the real story of his exclusion of color, or how we came to have colorful automobiles. Ford Model T, first introduced in 1908 Today, cars come in every...
High School Essay Contest Winners and First Prize Essay: The Champion Bridge Story
We are very proud to announce the winners in our first annual Student Essay Contest, open to American residents eighteen or under who submitted a history of a local company. Thanks to our donors, we are able to give out $7500 in prizes, including a $3000 first...
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...
U.S. States Population Animated Chart 1790-2020
This week we present another of our popular animated charts. In this one, we show the populations of the states of the United States from the Census, every ten years from 1790 through 2020. The list is long, including all fifty ultimate states. The data...
Uneeda Business History: the Nabisco Story
From its founding in 1898 at the height of the trust era, the National Biscuit Company quickly rose to become the largest of the big branded food companies. By the 1920s the company was far larger than such well-known companies as HJ Heinz, Campbell Soup,...
The First Giant Restaurant Chain: Howard Johnson’s: Rise and Fall
In the 1950s and 1960s, Howard Johnson’s rose to become the largest American restaurant chain, the first giant in the industry. The company’s familiar orange roofs and steeples covered much of the U.S. highway system. “HoJo’s” was also a leader in the development of...
Kimberly-Clark: From Commodities to Powerhouse Brands
Early in the twentieth century, the Kimberly-Clark paper company pioneered “sanitary napkins” with their Kotex brand. Magazine publishers resisted running ads for the innovative but very private product and retailers hesitated to display Kotex. The company...
A Real Goldmine: The Homestake Story
For over 125 years, South Dakota’s Homestake Mine churned out ore loaded with gold and silver. Thousands of men worked the strike down to over a mile and a half below the earth’s surface, the deepest mine in the Western hemisphere as well as the American mine...
Six Very Short Stories about Business History
Today we republish an excerpt from the book I wrote twenty-one years ago, including some short but sweet diverse business history stories. The original has been slightly edited and we have added a few more pictures. (The complete book, expanded but only available as...
Gimbel Brothers Department Stores: Dust to Dust
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 forgotten, named Gimbel...
Fast Food Before Fast Food: The Original Food Trucks
In the nineteenth century, restaurants were patronized by the wealthy and by travelers (at stagecoach stops, inns, and on trains and in train stations). Most workers brought their lunch from home. Over time, especially in cities, diners had more options....
America’s Largest Airlines 1950-2019 in Two Animated Charts
The United States airline system, one of the technological and business wonders of the twentieth century, evolved in the 1920s and 1930s. With early subsidies from the Post Office for carrying mail, airplanes began connecting US cities. With successive air...
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...
Gone with the Wind: Amazon Spends $8.45 Billion but Doesn’t Get the Best of M-G-M
In order to bolster their Amazon Prime Video streaming service, Amazon is buying the legendary M-G-M, probably the most famous of the great movie studios, for $8.45 billion. This will be the second biggest acquisition in Amazon’s history, exceeded only by its...
Ahmet Ertegun: America’s Greatest Music Man
This article first appeared in the Archbridge Institute’s American Originals Series. Ahmet Ertegun did as much as anyone to shape the popular music that serves as the soundtrack for our daily lives. As the founder and leader of Atlantic Records for almost sixty years,...
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