Edward William Bok was the most famous Dutch-American in early twentieth-century America thanks to his thirty-year editorship of the Ladies’ Home Journal, the most prestigious women’s magazine of the day. This first complete coverage of Edward Bok’s life places him against his ethnic background and portrays him as the spokesman for and the molder of the American middle class between 1890 and 1930. He acted as a mediator between a Victorian and a modern society, reconciling consumerism with idealism. As a Dutch immigrant he became a model for successful adaptation to a new country and modern times. He used his national reputation to restore America’s internationalism in the 1920s. His life story is relevant to those interested in the history of immigration, journalism, the rise of big business, the women’s movement, and the Progressive Movement.

First published in 1994. The articles in this collection are concerned with family-owned business enterprises and span three centuries and three continents. Family firms account for between 75 per cent and 99 per cent of all companies in the EC, and 65 per cent of GDP and employment in Europe. While the huge majority of family businesses are very small-scale, many are not. In the United States one-third of Fortune 500 companies are currentlyfamily-controlled.

Figured Tapestry is a study of industrial maturity and decline, focused on the Philadelphia textile trades from the era of the Knights of Labor through World War II. Unlike the bulk fabric enterprises of New England and the South, Quaker City textile firms were 'flexible specialists,' combining skilled labor, versatile technologies, and quick responsiveness to demand shifts to create a vast array of seasonal goods. Scranton assesses the significance and limits of industrial versatility, owner-operated businesses, craft labor and its organizations, and the agglomeration of specialist mills in urban districts. An interdisciplinary blend of business, labor, urban, and economic history, industrial geography, and the history of technology, Figured Tapestry illuminates the hidden world of batch production, the 'other side' of American industrialization, and highlights both the benefits and the hazards of flexibility, a matter of moment to those who seek to reorient current manufacturing away from the rigidities of mass production.

Between 1870 and 1920, the clerical sector of the U.S. economy grew more rapidly than any other. As the development of large corporations affected both the scale and the content of office work, the accompanying sexual stratification of the clerical workforce blurred the relationship between the new clerical work and earlier perceptions of white-collar status. Sons and Daughters of Labor reassesses the existence and significance of the "collar line" between white-collar and blue-collar occupations during this period of clerical work's greatest expansion and the beginning of its feminization.