Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

Chandler headshot
The great-grandson of Henry Varnum Poor, publisher of the American Railroad Journal, and a founder of Standard & Poor’s, Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. (1918-2007), born in Guyencourt, Delaware, graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1936 and Harvard College in 1940. After serving as a Navy officer in World War II, he returned to Harvard, finished his MA in 1946, and received his PhD in history in 1952. He taught at MIT (1950-1963) and in 1963, became chairman of the history department at Johns Hopkins University. In 1970, he joined the Harvard Business School where he taught business history and wrote extensively about the scale and management structures of modern corporations until he became Professor Emeritus in 1989.

Chandler’s books include Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (1962) which examined the organization of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Motors, and Sears, Roebuck and Co.; with Stephen Salsbury, Pierre S. Du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation (1971), a detailed study of the reorganization of top-level management at Du Pont and General Motors and biography of its instigator; The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1978; Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990); and the anthology Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (1997) co-edited with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino.

Chandler has been called “the doyen of American business historians”. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.


Stephen Salsbury

Stephen Salsbury (1931-1999) earned his BA from Occidental College in 1953 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1961. He became Assistant Professor of History (1963-67), Associate Professor (1968-70) and Professor of History (1970-77) at the University of Delaware. In 1977 he moved to the University of Sydney in Australia as professor of economic history.

Salsbury’s books include The State, The Investor, and the Railroad: The Boston and Albany, 1825-1869 (1967); No Way to Run a Railroad: The Untold Story of the Penn Central (1982); with Kay Sweeney, The Bull, the Bear and the Kangaroo: The History of the Sydney Stock Exchange (1988) and Sydney Stockbrokers: Biographies of Members of the Sydney Stock Exchange (1992).


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