Links to Business History Resources in the United States

American Precision Museum, Windsor, Vermont

Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts

The business manuscripts collections includes approximately 1,400 collections of original business manuscripts from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries. Subjects include agriculture, transportation services, manufacturing industries, and marketing and financial services, with over 30,000 photographs and prints documenting the history of American industry.

http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/

Harvard University's Open Collections Program

Includes "Women Working, 1800-1930", which focuses on women's role in the United States economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images.

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/

Charles River Museum of Industry, Waltham, Massachusetts

http://www.crmi.org/

American Textile History Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts

http://www.athm.org/

The Saga of Landers, Frary & Clark

Makers of housewares and hardware, of New Britain, Connecticut.

http://www.toaster.org/landers.html

Bridgeport [Connecticut] Public Library

The library holds records of companies such as the Locomobile Company, Warner Brothers, Sprague Meter, Remington Arms, Wheeler & Wilson and other Bridgeport companies.

http://www.bridgeportpubliclibrary.org/

History of the Pratt and Whitney Company founded in Hartford, Connecticut

http://www.prattandwhitney.com/history.htm

Museum of Connecticut History, Hartford, Connecticut

The focus of the museum is on Connecticut's government, industrial and military history.

http://www.museumofcthistory.org/

Museum of American Finance, New York, New York

http://www.financialhistory.org/

Smithsonian Institution: National Museum of American History

The Archives Center, at http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/archives/home.htm, holds the National Museum of American History's collections of personal papers, business records and commercial ephemera, sheet music, historic film, video, and photographs. Prominent among them is the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d7060a.htm.

Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware

The library houses a collection of books, pamphlets, trade catalogs, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and audiovisual materials documenting the history of American business and technology. Hagley's main strength is in the Middle Atlantic region, but the scope of collecting includes business organizations and companies with national and international impact.

http://www.hagley.lib.de.us/.

Penn State University, University Libraries, Special Collections. University Park, Pennsylvania. Historical Collections & Labor Archives

Documents on Pennsylvania's core industries, firms, and entrepreneurs form one significant group of HCLA's collections. There are account books dating from the mid-eighteenth century for several charcoal iron furnaces; correspondence of steel magnates and executives Andrew Carnegie, Charles Schwab, and William B. Dickson; business records for nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthracite and bituminous coal firms; and records for the Pennsylvania Railroad's Central Division and numerous subsidiary railroads. The letters and papers of prominent efficiency engineer Harrington Emerson also contain rich information on business operations.

http://www.libraries.psu.edu/speccolls/hcla/.

University of Pittsburgh Libraries, Archives of Industrial Society. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The Archives of Industrial Society (AIS) is the general designation for the hundreds of historical collections related to the development of the urban industrial society, with an emphasis on Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, preserved by the University of Pittsburgh. The Archives Service Center holds 626 collections comprising 19,424 linear feet of documentation, 48,195 microform units, 3,111 audio recordings, 132,000+photographs including 57,000 glass plates and 2,400 slides, more than 3,702 maps (many related to coal mining), and 1,300+ architectural drawings/blueprints, and 6,681 volumes.

http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/archives/ais.html

Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Collections are of the following subjects: Business and Economic development, community affairs, crime and the legal system, culture, education, health, housing, immigrant and ethnic communities, labor, politics and protest, social services, and transportation.

http://library.temple.edu/collections/urbana/

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Business History Resources in the Manuscripts Department at the Wilson Library.

http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/

Mahoning Valley [Ohio] Historical Society, Business and Media Archives of the Mahoning Valley

http://www.mahoninghistory.org/bmahome.stm

The Cleveland Memory Project: A Showcase for the Special Collections of the Cleveland State University Library

http://www.clevelandmemory.org/. Includes photographs of Cleveland Business and Commerce, at http://www.clevelandmemory.org/exhibits/industry.shtml

Cleveland State University Library, Cleveland, Ohio. Great Lakes Industrial History Collection

The materials available through the Great Lakes Industrial History Collection include personal and company records, diaries and other keepsakes of the visionaries and leaders who took enormous risks to create industrial development in the Great Lakes region.

http://web.ulib.csuohio.edu/SpecColl/glihc/

The Ohio Historical Society Youngstown Historical Center for Industry & Labor

The Archives/Library research facility houses local government records as well as materials relating to the iron and steel industries in northeastern Ohio and the development of organized labor. In addition to manuscript collections from corporations and labor unions such as the United Steelworkers of America, District 27, Subdistrict 6, the Archives/Library also holds and collects personal papers of local residents, oral history interviews with workers and managers, films and videos on steelmaking, photographs, blueprints, newspapers on microfilm, and reference books on industrial and labor history.

http://www.ohiohistory.org/youngst/arch_lib.html

U.S. Steel Gary Works Photograph Collection, 1906-1970

http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/steel/

Kettering University, Flint, Michigan. Kettering/GMI Alumni Foundation Collection of Industrial History

The collection seeks to collect and preserve manuscripts, photographs, printed materials and miscellaneous memorablia that relate to the development and growth of the automobile and related industries. Included are collections and documents recording the lives and contributions of people and events that helped shape America's industrial hertiage, particularly as it relates to the automobile industry.

http://www.gmi.edu/acad/histcoll/Welcome.html

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Milwaukee Urban Archives

The Archives, located at the Golda Meir Library of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is the premier repository for researching the history of Milwaukee-area businesses, civil rights, environmental campaigns, ethnic groups, families, housing, labor, urban development, women, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

http://www.uwm.edu/Library/arch/.

Information about Wisconsin Business History Resources is available at http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/arch/busag.htm

Minnesota Historical Society, Business Collections

Holds the records of dozens of Minnesota and American businesses, covering such businesses and industries as lumber, technology, manufacturing, banking and hardware.

http://www.mnhs.org/collections/manuscripts/business.htm

Return to Business History Collection page

This page maintained by L. Smith.