Louis Galambos Biography
Louis Galambos
Louis Galambos is Professor of Economic and Business History; Editor, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower; and Co-Director of the Institute for Applied Economics and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He has taught at Rice University, Rutgers University, and Yale University and has served as President of the Business History Conference and the Economic History Association. A former editor of The Journal of Economic History, he has written extensively on U.S. business history, on business-government relations, on the economic aspects of modern institutional development in America, and on the rise of the bureaucratic state. His books include Competition and Cooperation: The Emergence of a Modern Trade Association; The Public Image of Big Business in America, 1880-1940; America at Middle Age; The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth; The Fall of the Bell System; Networks of Innovation: Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World; Medicine, Science, and Merck; and The Moral Corporation. He is president of the Business History Group, a consulting organization, and has been an historical consultant to Merck & Co., Inc., Pacific Telesis Group, AT&T, and the World Bank Group.
In addition to editing The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Galambos has edited (with Robert Gallman) the Cambridge University Press series Studies in Economic History and Policy: The United States in the Twentieth Century. He is currently co-editor (with Geoffrey Jones) of the Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise and (with Franco Amatori) Comparative Perspectives in Business History.
In recent years Galambos's major interest has been the process of innovation and its links to the growth of large-scale organizations, professional institutions, and new government programs in the twentieth century. He began this line of inquiry in his analysis of the Bell System and is continuing his research and writing on this subject in a series of studies of the pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co., Inc. His recent publications include: "The U.S. Corporate Economy in the Twentieth Century," in vol. 3 of The Cambridge Economic History of the United States; and "The Monopoly Enigma, the Reagan Administration's Antitrust Experiment, and the Global Economy," in Constructing Corporate America.
Professor Galambos, who has an A.B. from Indiana University and a Ph.D. from Yale University, is a former Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a Business History Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Business Administration and a Fellow at the Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson Center and later at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. He has recently held the Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at the Library of Congress.