Chandler Donates Papers to Baker Library
CHANDLER: The historian's papers find a fitting home.
Photo by STUART CAHILL
Alfred D. Chandler Jr., the School’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, is known for his sweeping volumes chronicling the growth of modern capitalism, corporations, and management. Indispensable to these works are the notes, research, correspondence, and documents that Chandler has generated and collected over more than six decades. At a campus celebration in November, Chandler, the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus, donated this treasure trove to Baker Library so that others may study and make use of it, and observe how a historian works.
Comprising 224 boxes, Chandler’s papers include, among a wealth of other material, virtually all his lecture and seminar notes and professional correspondence; his editorial work on the papers of Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower; materials related to his work with Alfred Sloan for the GM president’s autobiography; and manuscript versions of his numerous articles and of influential books such as Strategy and Structure, The Visible Hand (winner of the Pulitzer in 1978), and Scale and Scope.
The Baker event, attended by many colleagues, friends, and former students, was hosted by HBS professor Geoff Jones, who observed that Chandler’s work has been distinguished by “its historical rigor and for thinking big.” After several fellow historians had praised him, Chandler rose to thank the gathering. In brief remarks, he recalled that his interest in history had been kindled when he was seven by Gordy’s Elementary History of the United States, a gift from his father in 1925. “I read it twenty times,” Chandler said. “It gave me a wonderful advantage as a historian. I knew every generation, every decade was different, and you couldn’t understand one decade unless you had seen the others.”
