Corporate History International is a blog to share stories and inspiration from the world of business history. I researched this beat for many years for publications of Cengage Learning / Gale Group / St. James Press. Hundreds of my entries for the International Directory of Company Histories have been reproduced online on sites such as Encyclopedia.com. I have also worked discretely for some of the very largest companies in the world.
In an age of Instagram and weaponized disinformation, deep dives through the archives have fallen out of fashion. While we gather around the glow of the latest shiny objects, the long threads of enterprise and innovation that brought them to us are obscured in the shadows. We navigate a postmodernist illusion where only surface appearances matter and carefully crafted historical narratives are sliced and diced and misinterpreted.
Yet most people are profoundly affected by corporations, virtually around the clock. They sign the checks and deliver the goods. And the patterns and forces that caused them to coalesce, to become as living bodies, are worth contemplating as we enter a disrupted, distributed, and sometimes disturbing new era.
Frederick C. Ingram
Corporate History International 