economists, and sociologists. While manydisagreements persist about the motivations of the actors, mostscholars roughly agree on the central shifts in technologies andmarkets that called forth big business. Recent scholarship,however, has revealed important new insights into the changingcultural values and sensibilities of Americans who lived during thetime, on women in business, on the ties between the emergingcorporations and other American institutions, on the nature ofcompetition among giant firms, and on the dawn of modernadvertising and consumerism.This vast accumulation of notable new work on the social conceptand consequences of economic change in that era has prompted GlennPorter to recast numerous portions of The Rise of Big Business, oneof Harlan Davidson’s most successful titles ever, in this,the third edition. Those familiar with this classic text willappreciate the expanded coverage of topics beyond the fray ofregulation and the political dimensions of the emergence ofconcentrated enterprise, namely the influence of the rise of bigbusiness on social history.An entirely new bank of photographs and illustrations rounds outthe latest edition of our enduringly popular title, one perfect forsupplementary reading in a variety of courses including the U.S.history survey, the history of American business, and specializedcourses in social history and the Gilded Age.

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