A History of Small Business in America (Twayne's Evolution of American Business Series, No. 10)

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Summary: A History of Small Business in America
Review: Small businesses have always mattered, providing significant growth, innovation, employment, products, services, and entrepreneurial opportunities. Blackford (history, Ohio State Univ.) clearly and concisely surveys small businesses' rich history in the US from Colonial times. He interweaves a broad overview with cases, biographies, and events to generate a uniquely useful narrative and analysis across the full range of business activities and interactions. Most important, Blackford masterfully contextualizes the changing balances of firm sizes across time, explaining why and how large firms have challenged small businesses in agriculture, manufacturing, retail, and service, blending social and cultural factors with the economics and policies that influence success and failure. Two new chapters insightfully detail Silicon Valley and bookstores as two very different cases that demonstrate small businesses' recent roles and dynamics. Blackford shows that small businesses usually succeed to the extent that they provide products or services to niche markets, whether directly to consumers or to other businesses, large or small. Expanded and reorganized into smaller chapters with short bibliographic essays, this second edition (1st ed., CH, Sep'92) will, like the first, serve well as a foundational text in US business history and economic history courses. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Public and academic library collections, lower-division undergraduates through faculty.