Special Collections and Archives Exhibits

Since the 1920s, HBS has been an innovative leader in the development and refinement of teaching with the case method, helping to shape business education programs and business leaders around the world. Drawing from materials in the HBS Archives, From Inquiry to Action examines the development of the case method during the foundational decades of HBS and the School’s early contributions that have led to the enduring influence of this participant-centered teaching practice.

Explore one of the most extensive collections in the world relating to the first international stock market crash. Browse features allow users to search materials in depth, an exhibition featuring selections from the collection provides further context for understanding the economic and social dimensions of the Bubble, and “The South Sea Bubble After Three Hundred Years,” an essay by Emma Rothschild, Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, Harvard University, underscores why the Bubble resonates today. 

From 1930 to 1960, the United States Steel Corporation commissioned photographers around the country to document the inner workings of the company and its subsidiaries as part of a national public relations campaign. These efforts occurred at a time when the steel industry, like today’s technology behemoths, reigned central in the world economy. From the Great Depression to the war years to the post-war boom, photography served as a persuasive tool in PR campaigns focused on promoting goodwill and a favorable attitude about policies concerning the corporation’s size, labor practices, and profit margins. Striking pictures of steel workers, blast furnaces, and company plants appeared in national magazines, company publications, and exhibitions that reached large audiences.

The history of Lehman Brothers, stretching over a century and a half, reflects the role of investment banking in the development and growth of the U.S. economy. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century, the family partnership evolved from a general store to a commodities brokerage to the fourth-largest investment banking house in the country. The firm survived through the Civil War, financial panics, two world wars, the Great Depression, mergers, spin-offs, and 9/11—making the transition from a family-run private partnership lasting more than one hundred years to a public company. Lehman Brothers provided investment banking and financial advisory services for corporations, the government, and private individuals, and consistently showed foresight in its ability to recognize the potential of emerging industries, from retail to aviation to high tech.

In 2001, Harvard Business School initiated a two-year oral history project to capture the stories of some of the most significant entrepreneurs of the time. The interviewees speak on a common set of themes including their development as entrepreneurs, strategies for identifying opportunity, and leadership. 

Celebrating the 50^th Anniversary of the founding of the African-American Student Union, Agents of Change examines the African American experience at Harvard Business School from 1915 to 1990, and honors the first 75 years of groundbreaking contributions of Black alumni and faculty.

Drawing from the wealth of material in the Polaroid corporate archives in Special Collections, this exhibit brings into focus the formative years and trajectory of the Polaroid Corporation and the career of Edwin H. Land. A scientist and inventor, entrepreneur and CEO, aesthete and humanist, Land fostered invention and creativity within the culture of a small, science-based research and manufacturing company. He argued that the industrial process should be “dedicated to the discernment of deep human needs.” His insights into those needs coupled with an eye for artistic expression guided the groundbreaking research ambitions of Polaroid—an iconic, 20th-century startup company.

Georges F. Doriot played a pioneering role in the emergence of the postwar entrepreneurial economy. During his 40-year tenure at Harvard Business School, Doriot taught business and leadership to nearly 7,000 students in his celebrated Manufacturing course. He realized his dream of establishing the first MBA program in Europe by helping to found the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD). Further, as president of American Research & Development Corporation (ARD), one of the first venture capital firms, Doriot fostered the development of startup companies that focused on emerging technologies.

Augustine Heard & Co. reigned among the largest American trading houses in China in the mid-19^th century, leaving behind an extensive chronicle of their experiences. The Heard papers, one of the largest collections of business records, professional accounts, and personal perspectives, document the life and trajectory of a prosperous 19^th century firm that prospered at the height of the China trade. These materials also offer a window into momentous events in Sino-Western relations as well as the day-to-day activities of American traders in the treaty ports.

From the mid-19^th to the early 20^th century, a burgeoning advertising industry in the United States reached a national market through the use of innovative printing technologies and marketing strategies that crossed the boundaries of art and commerce. Companies with products to sell reached wholesalers, retailers, and consumers, through media of all shapes, sizes, colors, and imagery. These early and extraordinarily inventive forms of advertising, including trade catalogs and trade cards, broadsides, posters, souvenir publications, and novelty items, advertised mass-produced products to an emerging American consumer culture.

In the mid-to-late 19^th century United States, more than 240,000 miles of railroad track was laid, connecting vast regions of the country, transporting raw materials, goods, and people, and making possible an unparalleled level of commerce. The railroad system, unprecedented in size and complexity, became one of the models on which modern capitalism would be based.  The financial and administrative records of key railroad companies illustrate this industry’s role in creating not only the foundations of modern business, but also a system of capitalism that survives to this day.

While the institutions and instruments of 21^st century credit are less than a century old, credit is as old as commerce. Previous generations devised creative ways of lending, borrowing, and securing loans well before credit cards or mortgage-backed securities. Though credit is not new, it is newly visible. Personal borrowing—once private, often secretive, and sometimes even illegal—has become decidedly public, moving from the fringes of the economy to its very center, needing to adapt to changing times as a pre-industrial, face-to-face society transformed into a long-distance market economy.

On September 18, 1934, a stunning exhibition sponsored by the National Alliance of Art and Industry and the Photographic Illustrators, Inc. opened in the gallery of New York City's 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The show featured 250 works by the top artistic and commercial photographers of the day, including Russell Aikins, Margaret Bourke-White, Nickolas Muray, John Paul Pennebaker, and William Rittase, with a focus on advertising and industrial images. The photographs contained within this collection survive as a telling chapter in the evolving perceptions about photography's artistic, commercial, and cultural significance.

Business education for women at Harvard University began with the founding of the one-year certificate program at Radcliffe College in 1937, leading to an HBS faculty vote to admit women into the two-year MBA program, and finally to the complete integration of women into campus life by 1970. A selection of photographs, interviews, reports, and correspondence documents how program directors, administrators, and faculty facilitated these women’s entry into the business world. The pioneering graduates of these programs opened the door for future generations of women to access formerly unattainable opportunities.

Four financial crises occurred during a particularly volatile century of economic history: in 1837, 1873, 1907, and 1929, asset price bubbles burst, shattering public confidence and devastating financial, securities, and credit markets around the world. These crises affected virtually everyone involved in the United States market economy and their causes and consequences remain subjects of debate. Historical materials reveal the voices, actions, and experiences of individuals who played a role in precipitating each crisis, those who suffered its ill effects, and those who seized an opportunity to profit from it.

The early years of Harvard Business School, from its founding in 1908 to the dedication of the campus in 1927, marked pivotal achievements; the "delicate experiment" was a success. In 1925 construction began on a magnificent campus alongside the Charles River. A wide array of architectural guidelines, correspondence, early plans, detailed blueprints, elevation drawings, and construction photographs demonstrate the process behind the planning and building of the campus, which Edwin Gay, the School's first dean, envisioned as "a concrete symbol of what American business is prepared to give-and be."

In the 1920s Elton Mayo, a professor of Industrial Management at Harvard Business School, and his protégé Fritz J. Roethlisberger led a landmark study of workers at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works plant. The School's role in the experiments represented a milestone in the dawn of the human relations movement, generating questions and theories about the relationship of productivity to the needs and motivations of the industrial worker. Graphs, charts, interviews, correspondence, publications, and photographs tell the story of the Hawthorne experiments and introduce pioneers in the human relations movement.

Assembled in the 1930s by Harvard Business School colleagues Donald Davenport and Frank Ayres, the Industrial Life Photograph Collection at Baker Library reveals the colliding—and sometimes competing—messages of art and industry, education and public relations, humanity and modernization. Over 2,100 images comprise the collection, featuring the work of such artists as Margaret Bourke-White and Lewis Hine. Its creators hoped to provide everyone from students and faculty to researchers and aspiring corporate managers with visual data to study the interaction of worker and machine: "the human factor."

From admonishing biblical allegory to scathing political cartoon, the images in the Bleichroeder Collection of prints resound with the same caution: where there is money, there is power, vice, corruption, and misfortune. Images produced over 400 years trace society's changing attitudes toward money from the Reformation and the Church's injunctions against usury, to the Industrial Revolution, to the emergence of modern capitalism. Parallels between past and present attitudes toward money are not deeply buried: representations of gamblers and lottery drawings, the idle rich and the penniless all seem remarkably contemporary.

Focus on five new major collecting themes: contemporary leadership, global markets, intellectual capital, invention and innovation, and visual evidence. Additional areas of collecting interest include documenting women in business and the significance of family business.

Unique among business school libraries, Baker Library possesses extraordinarily comprehensive and diverse historical collections consisting of letters, memos, reports, books, images, and more. These materials are frequently consulted by numerous scholars and used as evidence in the interpretation of historical events and the questioning of commonly held assumptions. Current initiatives are closely tied to trends in contemporary scholarship, and existing research collections are strengthened through a consistent focus on the evolution of business within five major themes: Contemporary Leaders, Global Markets, Intellectual Capital, Invention and Innovation, and Visual Evidence.

In October 1997, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Professor Robert C. Merton of Harvard University and Professor Myron S. Scholes of Stanford University, "for a new method to determine the value of derivatives." The Black-Scholes option pricing model established the everyday use of mathematical models as essential tools in the world of finance, both in the classroom and on the trading floor. Merton is the first HBS faculty member to receive a Nobel Prize and his groundbreaking work has greatly impacted both academic and financial communities.