Problems and Challenges in Business History Research with Special Reference to Entrepreneurial History

The major challenge to historians today is the same whether one's research lies in business history or general history. It is to focus the rapidly growing social knowledge of the mid-twentieth century upon historical materials and to do this mainly by asking new questions of the records, questions that will make history an analytic as well as a descriptive discipline. The historian of business is peculiarly well placed to meet this challenge. He works with the human element in an area that heretofore has been the concern of the oldest, most complex, and least humanistic social theory, economics. That is, by the nature of his materials the historian of business is forced to seek a reconciliation between actual human behavior and the implications of rigorous economic analysis. A similar challenge is offered in harnessing each of the other social sciences to the business historian's task. In so far as he succeeds in remolding these analytical disciplines to fit reality in the sphere of business, he solves the major problems of all historians and all social scientists.