Digital Exhibits

Explores the extraordinary career of Meroë Morse—a key contributor to the development of instant photography, trusted advisor to Polaroid founder Edwin Land, and liaison to iconic landscape photographer Ansel Adams.

Explore one of the most extensive collections in the world relating to the first international stock market crash. An exhibition featuring selections from the collection provides further context for understanding the economic and social dimensions of the Bubble.

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.

Baker Library Special Collections & Archives is vigorously building its archival and historical collections to support emerging trends in contemporary scholarship and research directions for the future.

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-19th century, the family partnership evolved from a general store to the fourth-largest investment banking house in the country.

From 1930 to 1960, the U.S. Steel Corporation commissioned photographers to document the inner workings of the company as part of a national public relations campaign. From the Great Depression through the post-war boom, photography served as a persuasive tool in PR campaigns.

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 50th 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.

This exhibit brings into focus the formative years and trajectory of the company and the career of Edwin H. Land. A scientist and inventor, entrepreneur and CEO, aesthete and humanist, he argued that the industrial process should be “dedicated to the discernment of deep human needs.”

Georges F. Doriot played a pioneering role in the emergence of the postwar entrepreneurial economy. During his 40-year tenure at HBS, Doriot taught business and leadership in his celebrated Manufacturing course. He also helped found the European Institute of Business Administration.

Augustine Heard & Co. was among the largest American trading houses in China in the mid-19th century, leaving behind extensive records of their experiences. The exhibit provides insight into momentous events as well as the day-to-day activities of American traders in the treaty ports.

A burgeoning advertising industry in the U.S. reached a national audience through innovative printing technologies and marketing strategies. Through Baker's collections, the role these inventive forms played in marketing mass-produced products to the evolving American consumer is explored.

In the mid-to-late 19th century United States, more than 240,000 miles of railroad track was laid. 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.

The instruments and institutions of 21st-century credit—the installment plan, the credit card, and the home finance industry—are less than a century old. Yet credit itself is as old as commerce. The site shows how previous generations devised creative ways of lending and borrowing long before credit cards.

On September 18, 1934, a stunning exhibition sponsored by the National Alliance of Art and Industry and the Photographic Illustrators, Inc. opened in New York. The show featured 250 works by the top artistic and commercial photographers of the day, with a focus on advertising and industrial images.

Photographs, interviews, reports, and correspondence document how program directors, administrators, and faculty facilitated women’s entry into business education, from the founding of the one-year certificate program at Radcliffe College in 1937 to their complete integration into HBS campus life in 1970.

In 1837, 1873, 1907, and 1929, asset price bubbles burst, shattering public confidence and devastating financial, securities, and credit markets around the world. Collections reveal the voices of individuals who played a role in precipitating each crisis, suffered its ill effects, or seized an opportunity to profit from it.

In this exhibit, 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.

In the 1920s, Elton Mayo, a professor of Industrial Management at HBS, and his protégé Fritz J. Roethlisberger led a landmark study of workers at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works plant. Graphs, charts, interviews, correspondence, publications, and photographs tell the story of the experiments.

Assembled in the 1930s by HBS colleagues Donald Davenport and Frank Ayres, the Industrial Life Photograph Collection reveals the colliding—and sometimes competing—messages of art and industry, education and public relations, humanity and modernization.

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.

Focuses 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.

In October 1997, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Professors Robert C. Merton of Harvard University and Myron S. Scholes of Stanford University, "for a new method to determine the value of derivatives." Merton is the first HBS faculty member to receive a Nobel Prize.