Americans' attitudes regarding the moral legitimacy of business ebb and flow, generation by generation. When John Chamberlain wrote this classic history of American business in 1960. the attitude of American intellectuals toward business was almost universally skeptical, when not actually hostile. The only major exceptions to this rale were on the college campus - and really only at the best colleges - where a handful of innovating scholars were beginning to revolutionize the study of American economic history, men such as the present "dean" of American business historians, Thomas С. Cochran. They understood the magnitude of the achievements of American entrepreneurs in a nation which long has enjoyed comparative freedom from government intervention into markets. What is remarkable in retrospect is how well (and how early) John Chamberlain told essentially the same story, but in the language of the journalist rather than the college professor. The Enterprising Americans was itself an act of intellectual entrepreneurship. It pioneered a new vision of the American past.