In accordance with the proper procedures of economic history and nicely within the limitations of my own knowledge, my comments upon the three papers presented take the form of recollections of some of the business conditions met with in my forty-four years of service with a single manufacturing and selling company.

Geographers and city planners, endeavoring to explain or foretell changes in urban population, sometimes use an approach called basic-nonbasic. A basic factor is one which brings in money from outside of the city and which usually sells its products beyond the city limits. The nonbasic factor furnishes services and supplies to the city. Thus a factory would normally be a basic factor, while grocery stores, barber shops, and similar institutions, together with most professional groups, would be nonbasic. A factory employing a thousand workmen would add to the city not merely the workmen's families but about an equal group of nonbasic families, perhaps a total of six or seven thousand persons. This concept is a very useful one in modern society and is worth testing for its possibilities for medieval settlements.

Robert W. Fogel was a visionary economic historian, generous mentor, and eternal optimist whose works and lectures have informed and incited for more than half a century and whose writings will continue to do so for decades to come. He died on June 11, 2013 in his eighty-sixth year. He had co-taught a graduate course at the University of Chicago that quarter and in the weeks before he died he was planning his fall 2013 teaching. “I've often told my students I'm not retiring. You're going to have to carry me out in a wooden box. I'm having too much fun,” he remarked to a recent class.

This article examines barriers that impeded the accumulation of land by African Americans in the postbellum South with a new data set of real estate transactions from 1880 Tennessee. We find that rates of purchase by African Americans differed little between plantation and non-plantation regions. We also find that parcels sold in plantation regions were relatively small, suggesting that African American accumulation of land was not hindered by plantation owners refusing to subdivide their properties. Additionally, we find blacks paid more than whites per acre of quality-constant land, although literacy at least partially mitigated the racial price discrimination.