Professor Gressley recounts the escapades of domestic and international promoters in the history of the Salt Creek oil field, demonstrating that fraud and chicanery can play indispensable roles in the process of economic development.

In the late 1840's, under the leadership of the Boston and Maine management, the seven steam railroads in Boston promoted the development of suburbs by lowering fares and providing frequent commuter trains. By 1855 the volume of commuter traffic was of sufficient magnitude and the fares so low as to depress the earning power of the seven roads. When the managements attempted to offset increases in wages and material costs with higher commuter fares, the commuters on one line dramatically and successfully staged a revolt. The policy of deliberately developing commuter service as a by-product not only stimulated the urban development of Greater Boston but also influenced the philosophy of railroad management itself.

Despite a widely prevailing judicial insensitivity to corporate reform and regulation, the large insurance companies found themselves under careful, constant, and not always sympathetic legal scrutiny. This scrutiny tended to emphasize the equity rather than the letter of the law, and kept the insurance contract the flexible servant of a dynamic society and industry.

The long, slow decline of the handicraft industries in Western Europe was attended by protracted hardship and misery for the artisan classes, short-term exploitative opportunities for crass merchants to whom the old medieval communal values were outdated cant, and confusion and eventual rout for the town fathers who attempted to maintain such values in the face of ineluctable economic change. Professor Friedrichs draws these conclusions from his research on woolen cloth weavers in the German town of Nördlingen in the seventeenth century and shows how, once the old values were no longer useful, the state itself took the initiative in the eighteenth century in facilitating the conversion of handicraft industry to the modern wage-labor system.

Two major universities in the United States have recently added to their curriculum work in business history.

The history of Plan Calcul―France's first information technology program, launched by de Gaulle's government in 1966―has been well described in the literature; however, few studies investigate the arsenal system of the program in depth. Drawing from Plan Calcul's archives, this article is the first to demonstrate that, in the context of de Gaulle's Cold War foreign policy, the French government, initially aiming to avoid an arsenal system, still became the program's funding supplier, entrepreneur, and client. Plan Calcul aimed to establish an industrial-type operation but was ultimately reduced to a state information technology arsenal program.

The Business Historical Society calls to the attention of its members a recent publication which should be of greatest value and interest. This is the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, which has been published jointly by the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the American Geographical Society of New York.

The glamor of the American whale fishery has tended to obscure its economic outlines and significance. For certain areas one of the first successful efforts at natural resources exploitation, the fisheries developed centers of highly specialized technical and administrative skills. Capital amassed in whaling was a far from inconsequential economic force when it was shifted into other channels of investment. The shifting process itself highlights the circumstances surrounding a dying industry and provides an example of variant national investment patterns.