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The purpose of this paper is to analyze how popular culture in general and movies in particular both reflected and shaped public attitudes to newly emerging corporate giants in the 1950s; to demonstrate how that view was itself shaped by political context and prevailing American ideology.

The paper rests on a content analysis of 11 corporate films released in the USA between 1954 and 1960.

Studying corporate movies during the 1950s lends an appreciation of the salience of understanding the political/cultural context of business history. The movies also reflected Cold War realities: the constraints imposed by an anti‐communist blacklist, and the belief – hope, perhaps – that capitalist corporations would stand as a bulwark against the alien ideology of Communism.

The films studied are all US‐made. Studying films from later decades might also lend additional perspective.

The paper demonstrates the value of considering political context and ideology in understanding business history.

The stand‐out works this year are a number of comprehensive general discographies. Before reviewing them in detail in Part Two, I would like to single out three of them here for special attention.

This compilation of over 500 United States Government bibliographies is the second annual supplement to BIBLIOGRAPHY OF UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT BIBLIOGRAPHIES 1968–1973 (Pierian Press). Due to the Government Printing Office backlog during 1974, many 1973 and 1974 titles are included in this 1975 Supplement, which should have appeared earlier.

A review is made of several efforts to describe the instructional emphasis and curricular content of courses relating to theory in educational administration. A summary is then provided of the evolution and eventual discontinuance of one approach to the teaching of theory which has previously been cited in the literature. Finally, a course format initiated as a replacement for the aforementioned instructional approach is described, and the content of the new course is discussed in some detail. A thesis of the article is that by making explicit what is taught concerning theory in educational administration it is thereby possible to provide a greater impetus for an increased theoretical orientation within the discipline.

Although the global economic crisis that began in 2007 has renewed interest in Keynes among the wider educated public, graduate courses in macroeconomics usually teach little about Keynes and the issues he analyzed, and what little they teach is often wrong (e.g., that Keynes assumed an arbitrarily fixed money wage rate or that he ignored expectations). Consequently, as macroeconomists turn their attention to the possibility, causes and consequences of financial crises and global depression, they do not have access to the insights into these questions produced by earlier generations of economists. The time and attention constraints of theory courses do not allow simply directing the students to the extensive scholarly literature on the economics of Keynes, so this paper offers a suggested introduction to the economics of Keynes for a graduate course in macroeconomics.

Government agencies have endeavored, with limited success, to improve the methodological consistency of regulatory benefit–cost analysis (BCA). This paper recommends that an independent cohort of economists, policy analysts and legal scholars take on that task. Independently established “best practices” would have four positive effects: (1) they would render BCAs more regular in form and format and, thus, more readily assessable and replicable by social scientists; (2) improved consistency might marginally reduce political opposition to BCA as a policy tool; (3) politically-motivated, inter-agency methodological disputes might be avoided; and (4) an independent set of “best practices” would provide a sound, independent basis for judicial review of agency BCAs.

A few hours before the May 17, 2004 gala to commemorate the legal decision that ended “separate but equal” facilities for black and white U.S. citizens, comedian Bill Cosby heard a radio broadcast that was on his wavelength. As Cosby listened to “Ask the Chief” on May 17, 2004 Washington, DC Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey recounted the number of children who had been the victims of homicide (Schroeder, 2004). A few hours later, Cosby picked up on the discussion with a live audience at Constitution Hall to celebrate the historic verdict of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. During the event, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Howard University acknowledged Cosby for his multimillion dollar contributions to historically black colleges and universities.