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During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Great Britain utilized its extensive coal reserves to emerge as the world's leading industrial power. "If a patch of a few square miles has done so much for central England," one British writer pondered in 1856, "what may fields containing many hundred square leagues do for the United States?" In the story of American coal, the two most important states on the eve of the nineteenth century were Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia was endowed with bituminous coal reserves in both the James River Basin and its western counties, while Pennsylvania enjoyed a virtual monopoly on American anthracite coal as well as a massive bituminous region west of the Allegheny Mountains.

A generation of historians, working at the intersection of business history and cultural history, has examined the consumer culture that flourished in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In studies of advertising, marketing, department stores, credit systems, and other aspects of selling and buying, these scholars have shown that American businesses not only produced consumer goods but also created consumer desire.

In 1973 at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), one of the first local area networking (LAN) technologies was invented: Ethernet. Today, Ethernet is the dominant LAN standard but, as is the case with most other information technologies, Ethernet was neither the only available alternative nor a technology well suited for all networking needs from the outset. In fact, when it was first commercialized in 1980, Ethernet was a relatively expensive, high-end technology, suited for connecting minicomputers or workstations but too expensive for connecting microcomputers or personal computers (PCs), soon to be the largest LAN market.

The reasons why photographic illustration was generally avoided by American print advertisers before 1913, even though halftone technology had made such illustration economically advantageous, have not been adequately explored. This article explains that art directors initially avoided the medium because of its slavish dependence on material reality. Photography offered too much detail; it seemed incapable of the abstraction or idealization necessary for "capitalist realism." The change in this outlook can be dated from the work of Lejaren à Hiller, who, borrowing fine art aesthetics and techniques from pictorialist photography, established the medium as suitable for the complex visual and narrative strategies required by the social tableaux advertising of the period.

This article places the British and American postal telegraph movements in the broader context of a transatlantic reform tradition. More specifically, British nationalization in 1870 gave American reformers both a rallying point and a rationale for postalizing the telegraphs. The legacies of both movements were mixed. In Britain, the postal telegraph provided inexpensive and accessible service, but it soon ran a large deficit and retarded the development of the telephone industry. In the United States, reformers failed to nationalize the telegraph or to secure a place in historical memory, but they succeeded in pressuring Western Union to provide better service, and they provided the impetus for the municipal ownership movement of the Progressive Era.

It is London 1856. William Henry Perkin serendipitously invents the first synthetic dye while he is trying to synthesize quinine, a medicine for malaria. The nineteen-year-old Perkin leaves the Royal College of Chemistry and quickly commercializes his aniline purple dye, launching the synthetic dye industry. From that time on, the industry continues to dazzle the eye with ever new and appealing dye colors. Perkin, along with entrepreneurs from Britain and France, dominates the synthetic dye industry for the next eight years. During this period, British and French firms introduce most other innovative synthetic dyes onto the market, and they hold the largest global market share.