A Gallery of Distinguished Individuals: The Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders

Abstract

Scholarly biographical dictionaries, it might be argued, mark coming of age of a historical discipline. Britain's Dictionary of National Biography was completed in 1900 (in sixty-three volumes and after eighteen years' work); Dictionary of American Biography was finished in 1936 (in twenty volumes and after ten years' work). These monumental dictionaries quickly became standard reference tools by which British and American studies have been advanced. Specialist historians in last two or three decades have pushed forward their respective fields with biographical dictionaries (to name a few) of American state governors, history of Parliament, British labor leaders, international scientists, British radicals in seventeenth century, British women, and American women. It is now turn of business leaders. Over past six or seven years business historians in United States, Britain, France, Italy, and elsewhere have emb)arked on dictionary studies of their national business heroes. The first to be completed is this work by John Ingham of University of Toronto. Any such dictionary invites answers to four critical questions. What is its purpose? How have entries been selected? How are individual entries treated? What sort of utility will dictionary have? Broadly speaking, biographical dictionaries may have one or two purposes. They may be an end in themselves, presenting a collection of subjectively chosen but distinguished individuals. Alternatively they may, like History of Parliament, contain all individual cases for a collective biography (prosopography) because individuals make up a discrete group (e.g. members of Parliament) or a statistically representative sample of that group. Ingham says little about objectives he had in mind when framing his Dictionary, disclosing only that the goal of dictionary is to provide information on 'historically