Amidst the dizzying swirl of today's e-commerce transactions, it is sometimes difficult to remember what the business world was like before the advent of computer technology. For campus visitors who want to take a minute to reflect on a less automated business era, there is a new permanent exhibit on display in Morgan Hall, titled "The Emergence of Modern American Business." The exhibit features large black-and-white photographs, colorful advertising cards, informative broadsides, and other memorabilia selected from the Baker Library Historical Collections, all reproductions that are tastefully mounted and displayed on the first floor's north and south corridor walls.

"We chose images from the 1850s to the early 1930s -- the so-called Second Industrial Revolution -- that characterized industries important to the emergence of modern American business, such as railroads, textiles, automobiles, and airlines," says Curator Laura Linard, director of historical collections at Baker Library. The period also corresponds to the rise of graduate business schools, including HBS (founded in 1908), which were established to train managers for their unprecedented roles in these large, new enterprises. While the south corridor's exhibit items focus on these industries, materials hung in the north corridor depict aspects of modern marketing, displaying advertising materials for products and services such as bicycles, mackerel, beer, barbed wire, and clipper ships.

Each entry tells a story. An 1868 broadside, for example, showing a worker's timetable at the Lowell Mills in Massachusetts, speaks volumes about its time. "One thing you notice when you look at that," says Pulitzer Prize­winning business historian Professor Thomas K. McCraw, who wrote an introduction to the exhibit, "is what a long workweek it was and how extraordinarily controlling companies were in the early days before the labor movement." In subtle contrast, a striking 1933 portrait of a woman cotton warper at the Shelton Looms in Shelton, Connecticut, by famed documentary photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, suggests the value of the individual worker.

"The Baker Library Historical Collections contain such rich material for faculty and student research, normally not seen by the public," says Linard. "This exhibit provides a wonderful opportunity to make these materials more accessible."

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