A comparative examination of late nineteenth-century worker productivity, machine utilization, and management methodology reveals the importance of process-oriented organization in American factories, where the highest technical skills were directed not at making products, as in Europe, but at making production lines. This orientation, together with a rapidly changing environment, required a particular kind of management and a new awareness of the management function.

This cross-sectional study of small business tests conventional assumptions regarding backgrounds, motivation, characteristics, function, risks, and longevity, proving many of those assumptions to be imprecise or false. Quantification in historical depth reveals definite patterns both of fixity and change.

The Nebraska public-power paradox is more than a case study of the elimination of private enterprise. It illustrates how, in a seemingly homogeneous economic setting, familiar social, political, economic, and geographic factors can blend uniquely to produce a nonconformist entity, explicable only in terms of its history.

The property bank, an ingenious new institution that provided badly needed capital for southern mercantile and agricultural operations, appears to have been the creation of one man's imagination. It is ironical that he died in financial embarrassment, leaving behind few clues for the curious historian.

China's Imperial Canal excited the imagination of a succession of travelers. While American and British canal promoters were interested in the technological details, the true importance of the Chinese precedent lay in the breadth of concept — a gigantic, state-supported geophysical manipulation in the interests of interregional trade.