Edward Gould Buffum (1820-1867) went to California in 1846 as a soldier in a New York regiment during the Mexican War. There, Buffum and his regiment helped wrest California from Mexico. After his discharge from the army, Buffum remained to pan gold in the area around John Sutter's sawmills where it had just been discovered. A journalist by profession, Buffum recorded his experiences in a book, Six Months in the Gold Mines, from which this excerpt comes. He commented with wonder that men in the California gold mines earned one hundred dollars per day on average. To understand what a fortune this was, consider that women working as domestic servants in northeastern cities at this time earned between four and seven dollars per month.

In the late 1940s, large labor unions and major corporations worked out an accord that would guide labor-management relations for the next quarter century. During this period, unions benefited from high wages and relative stability, while relegating company decision-making to management. Many workers in certain geographic areas and sectors of employment, however, were not affected by the accord. In "union-free" Gainesville, Georgia, union representatives had started to organize a predominately female workforce in a large poultry plant. In the following statement to a House subcommittee on labor-management relations, Roy F. Scheurich, vice-president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America related a violent mob attack led by company officials. Joseph M. Jacobs, the union's general counsel, then argued that language in the Taft-Hartley Act, which regulated labor-management relations, allowed employers "apparent immunity" from legal responsibility for mob violence against labor representatives unless direct involvement could be proven. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 by a Republican-led Congress over President Harry S. Truman's veto, amended provisions of the 1935 Wagner Act. Jacobs argued for restoration of the Wagner Act's language. In September 1951, one month after this hearing, a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board held the Jewell Company liable for instigating the riot described in the statement.

A 1923 billboard advertisement for Endicott-Johnson shoes touted employee satisfaction as an important feature of the product. Company president George F. Johnson was a leading proponent of welfare capitalism

In 1933, newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt announced a "Good Neighbor Policy" that promised a more friendly and less interventionist policy toward Latin America. The policy was prompted as much by Latin American resistance to U.S. intervention as by the U.S. government's benevolence. In 1937, the policy was put to the test when Bolivia charged that Standard Oil of New Jersey had defrauded the Bolivian government; Bolivia canceled the company's oil drilling rights and confiscated its facilities. True to its new policy, the United States avoided military intervention and instead pressured Bolivia by withholding loans and technical assistance. The following year, a war of words erupted between the government of Mexico and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey over who owned the rights to exploit a portion of Mexico's oil reserves. After U.S. oil companies refused to accept the arbitration terms of the Mexican labor board, Mexican President Lzaro Crdenas expropriated oil company properties worth an estimated half billion dollars. In The Reply to Mexico, Standard Oil offered a vigorous response to the Mexican expropriation of its property in 1938.

The New Deal Public Works Administration, created in 1933, built public institutions, but failed to ease the severe housing shortage by constructing homes. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure home mortgages and loans for home repairs at low-interest, long-term rates. While the FHA helped middle-income homeowners, it refused to insure mortgages in poorer inner-city areas where the risks of default were seen as greater than in the suburbs. FHA guidelines also by supporting racial covenants that prevented African Americans from moving into "white" neighborhoods. The following statement by a Newark, New Jersey, African-American newspaper to a joint Congressional committee on housing—created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall passage of a public housing bill—charged that policies of racial discrimination denied access to people of color for housing in both private and public facilities. The Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that restrictive covenants were not legally enforceable and FHA subsequently banned restrictive covenant clauses in contracts. Racial discrimination in housing continued, however, in sales of existing houses and through unwritten "gentlemen's agreements" between realtors and buyers. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination in public accommodations, but de facto segregation continued in many parts of the U.S.

New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to "double-up." The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, "A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization." Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years--and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases--by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, four spokespersons for housing reform--including social worker Mary K. Simkhovitch, a leading reform advocate since the 1920s--presented views and proposals.

In a sales transaction, both the selling and buying entities have economic events that must be recognized in their accounting information system. Students enrolled in a principles of financial accounting course often confuse the accounts to be used by the seller and buyer. This problem-based learning activity helps students practice recording a business-to-business sales/purchase transaction that included credit terms from both perspectives. The problem applies the gross method for recording sales and purchases for a perpetual inventory scenario.

In the late 1940s, large labor unions and major corporations worked out an accord that guided labor-management relations for the next quarter century. During this period, unions benefited from high wages and relative stability, while relegating company decision-making to management. Many workers in certain geographic areas and sectors of employment, however, were not affected by the accord. In "union-free" Gainesville, Georgia, union representatives had started to organize a predominately female workforce in a large poultry plant. In the following statement to a House subcommittee on labor-management relations, these representatives related a violent mob attack led by company officials. They called for legislation to repeal a clause in the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 by a Republican-led Congress over President Harry S. Truman's veto. The clause, the union representatives argued, encouraged employers threatened with union organizing to encourage citizens groups and local authorities to undertake vigilante actions against union organizers. In September 1951, one month after this hearing, a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board held the Jewell Company liable for instigating the riot described in the statement.

This course is a graduate reading seminar, in which historical and contemporary studies are used to explore the interaction of technology with social and political values. Emphasis is on how technological devices, structures, and systems influence the organization of society and the behavior of its members. Examples are drawn from the technologies of war, transportation, communication, production, and reproduction.

The course will investigate e-Learning systems from a business, policy, technical and legal perspective. The issues presented shall be tackled by discussion of the design and structure of the various example systems. The connection between information architectures and the physical workplace of the users will also be examined. There course will be comprised of readings, discussions, guest speakers and group design sessions. Laboratory sessions will be focused on implementation tools and opportunities to create one's own working prototypes. Students will learn to describe information architectures using the Unified Modeling Language (used to specify, design and structure web applications) and XML (to designate meaningful content).

By the early 1890s, the 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were larger than the standing army of the United States. In the 1880s, the Pinkertons provided services for management in 70 different labor disputes. The agency's success depended on both armed guards and the clandestine efforts of secret operatives like James McParlan, who had infiltrated Irish anthracite miners' organizations in the mid 1870s. McParlan's testimony (which historians have largely dismissed as fabricated) at the sensational "Molly Maguire" trial of 1876 helped send ten men to the gallows and broke the miners' union for a generation. This advertisement from the 1890s touted the prowess of the Pinkerton detective agency in maintaining law and order and played on corporate fears of "dissatisfaction among the laboring classes" to build business.

This exhibit highlights a selection of advertisements from Wisconsin city directories published between 1857 and 1930. City directories are commercially-published compilations of the names, addresses, and professions of people in a particular town or city. The earliest formal city directories published in the United States document major urban areas on the East Coast and date to the 1780s. In Wisconsin, the earliest city directories date to the 1850s; by the 1920s, at least one directory was published for most of the large and mid-sized cities in the state.

Subject focuses on some of the important current issues in strategic management. It concentrates on modern analytical approaches and on enduring successful strategic practices. It is consciously designed with a technological and global outlook since this orientation in many ways highlights the significant emerging trends in strategic management. Subject is intended to provide the students with a pragmatic approach that guides the formulation and implementation of corporate, business, and functional strategies. Restricted to Sloan Fellows.

This course is intended to be an extension of course 15.902, Strategic Management, with the purpose of allowing the students to experience an in-depth application of the concepts and frameworks of strategic management. Throughout the course, Professor Hax will discuss the appropriate methodologies, concepts, and tools pertinent to strategic analyses and will illustrate their use by discussing many applications in real-life settings, drawn from his own personal experiences.

In the years after the Revolution many immigrants to the United States were political radicals, including John Doyle's father, who participated in the Irish Republican revolt against Great Britain in 1798 and later emigrated to Philadelphia. Like John Doyle, the author of this letter, many migrants brought craft skills and looked for work in the workshops and manufacturies of the new nation. When Doyle crossed the Atlantic in 1818 he quickly learned that small-scale entrepreneurship was more lucrative than sticking with his printing trade. Later immigration swelled as some two million Irish came to the United States between 1820 and 1860. The catastrophic Irish Potato Famine of 1845-49 sent hundreds of thousands (250,000 in 1851 alone) to disembark in cities where they faced economic hardships and ethnic discrimination.

This book is suited for the Entrepreneurship or Innovation course with an emphasis on Sustainability or for a course devoted entirely to Sustainability.

What are the trends and forces underlying the changing character of the business-environment relationship? How they are creating significant entrepreneurial opportunities for individuals and companies? Around the world, the movement toward “sustainable development” has caused many firms to adopt policies and practices that reflect what is sometimes called a “sustainable business” or “triple bottom line” approach. “Triple bottom line” refers to the demonstration of strong performance across economic, social, and environmental indicators. Those measures serve as indicators of fiduciary responsibility to a growing set of concerned investors and therefore can help ensure access to capital. They also enable innovators to lower costs, create strategic differentiation, reduce risk, and position themselves for competitive advantage over rivals less attuned to trends.

The deep roots of sustainability thinking are now evident in widespread and increasingly visible activities worldwide, and Sustainability, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship explores this evolution; its necessity, its implications and its progression.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Asian and Latino immigrants flocked to the United States, rivaling in sheer numbers the trans-Atlantic immigration of a century earlier. Many came because even minimum wage work in the United States paid five to ten times more than they could earn in their homelands. These Asian workers, photographed in 1991 as they labored in a garment shop in lower Manhattan, typified the work experience of many immigrants: monotonous, low wage work in conditions reminiscent of clothing industry sweatshops from earlier in the twentieth century.

With 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves, the forces of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were larger than the nation's standing army in the late-19th century. The Pinkertons provided services for management in labor disputes, including armed guards and secret operatives like Charles A. Siringo. A Texas native and former cowboy, Siringo moved to Chicago in 1886, where first-hand observation of the city's labor conflict (which he attributed to foreign anarchism) moved him to join the Pinkertons. Angry with the agency after it sabotaged the publication of his cowboy memoirs, Siringo published Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism, a revealing chronicle of Pinkerton methods and deception. Guarding its reputation, the Pinkerton Agency succeeded in suppressing the book. Operatives bought up all copies available at newsstands and a court order confiscated the book's plates. In the following passage from Two Evil Isms, Siringo (who, even when alienated from the Pinkertons, never displayed any sympathy for the labor movement) described how he infiltrated and undermined miners' unions in northern Idaho during the 1892 Coeur d'Alene strike.

The country store was an important crossroads in nineteenth-century rural communities. In the decades after the War for Independence, commercial activity increased in the hinterlands as rural residents brought their farm produce to local storekeepers to exchange for commodities (such as rum) that were not produced locally. With cash scarce, much of the trade was conducted by barter and recorded in the merchant's account books or "daybooks," and traveling peddlers extended market activity beyond the reach of village stores. It was in this commercializing environment that Phineas Taylor Barnum honed his entrepreneurial skills. Barnum, born in Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810, eventually took his skills to New York City where he achieved fame as a cultural impresario and museum owner. He wrote several autobiographies that became key documents in the substantial nineteenth-century advice literature on how to achieve fame and fortune; this excerpt is drawn from The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written By Himself (1855) where he described his early days in greatest detail.

Japan invaded China in 1931. The ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT) in China, led by Chiang Kai-shek, initially adopted a nonresistance policy toward the Japanese. Many overseas Chinese, including members of New York City's Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA), opposed the KMT's passive position and organized "Save China" campaigns to raise money for a strong China. The CHLA sent letters and telegrams to American politicians urging them to adopt policies to support China against Japan. But the CHLA's main strategy was to appeal directly to the American public by approaching their customers, residents of New York City. This 1938 article in the Chinese Vanguard reported on the CHLA's anti-Japanese work and efforts to mobilize support for China.