The antimonopoly critique of big business that flourished in the United States during the 1880s is a neglected chapter in the history of American reform. In this essay, a revised version of Richard R. John's 2011 Business History Conference presidential address, John shows how this critique found expression in a gallery of influential cartoons that ran in the New York City–based satirical magazines Puck and Judge. Among the topics that the cartoonists featured was the manipulation of the nation's financial markets by financier Jay Gould.

Labor Makes the News examines newspaper coverage of organized labor during the burst of union activity that began in the early 1930s. For activists and sympathizers, it was an article of faith that newspapers were deliberately unfair. However, publishers and their employees responded to the labor movement with great diversity, in part because publishers recognized that many readers were union members. For reporters, covering labor tested the boundary between personal and political interests and the professional ideal of neutrality on news pages. While publicly condemning the press, labor officials used newspapers to establish their legitimacy and wage war against enemies. Examining the treatment of organized labor provides a window for viewing the interplay among the sociopolitical, economic, and occupational goals of the publisher, the editorial worker, and the labor leader.

Nowadays, brands are inescapable. Economists and marketing experts trace this pervasive presence back to the 1980s when brands and branding seemed to promise new, crucial assets for both producers and consumers. Of course, brands existed much earlier, and although some authors claim that “brands are as old as known civilization,” most researchers accept that they burgeoned with the coming of large consumer-goods–oriented factories in the 1870s, generating the “first golden era for the modern brand mark” in the 1890s. The recent success of brands has stimulated historians' attention to product variety, advertisements, brand management, firms' and products' reputations, consumer loyalty, the significance of brands, and much more.

This article is concerned with business strategies of political risk management during the twentieth century. It focuses especially on Beiersdorf, a pharmaceutical and skin care company in Germany. During World War I, the expropriation of its brands and trademarks revealed its vulnerability to political risk. Following the advent of the Nazi regime in 1933, the largely Jewish owned and managed company faced a uniquely challenging combination of home and host country political risk. This article reviews the company's responses to these adverse circumstances, challenging the prevailing literature that interprets so-called “cloaking” activities as one element of businesses' cooperation with the Nazis. We also depart from the previous literature in assessing the outcomes of the company's strategies after 1945 and examine the challenges and costs faced by the company in recovering the ownership of its brands. While the management of distance became much easier over the course of the twentieth century because of communications improvements, this article shows that the management of governments and political risk grew sharply.

Historians have become increasingly aware of how religion dovetailed with businessmen's goals of promoting free-enterprise ideologies and creating an anti-statist and anti-union political culture. But business expected more from religion; many employers believed that emphasizing spirituality could help them win community support and worker loyalty and avoid unions. When the electrical manufacturing industry began to move South after World War II, key employers had already witnessed the role that religion played in helping defeat the CIO's Southern Organizing Campaign. However, they balked at borrowing the overtly racist and reactionary evangelicalism that southern employers had effectively used. Instead, they looked for a more moderate religious model that would blend with their growing interest in human relations. They found it in Reverend George Heaton, an ordained Southern Baptist minister who had begun counseling employers during the 1930s. Heaton emphasized the sacred imperative driving good human relations and rejected the “fetish” of collective bargaining that he believed robbed individual freedom and the personal relationships that created harmonious workplace communities. As GE, Westinghouse, Magnavox, and Singer moved to the South, they all hired Heaton to be “minister” to their employees. This strategy had its limits, however, as this article will demonstrate using case studies of organizing drives in Rome, Georgia, and Greeneville, Tennessee. Nevertheless, Heaton was an important and understudied bridge between earlier paternalistic uses of religion and more modern Christian human relations.

This article discusses the interaction between directors and small shareholders who made up the majority of names on the share ledgers of many companies in both the UK and the USA. It is concerned with the period 1890–1965 and concentrates on the management/shareholder relationship in the context of the annual general meeting and shareholder activism. I argue that there were significant differences between shareholder activism in the UK and the USA, due to the difference in relative numbers of the shareholders themselves, to legal and geographic differences, to corporate culture, and to the earlier diffusion of shareholding in the UK compared to the USA. UK shareholders concentrated their interventions on management issues, as well as some social and labor matters. US shareholders, mostly through so-called ‘corporate gadflies’, concentrated their efforts on corporate governance issues, some of which were already enshrined in UK company law and practice.