Christopher Demuth
Christopher Demuth was a tobacconist whose business — Demuth’s Tobacco Shop — operated for over two centuries at the same location in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Read More »
A Reputation for Cross-Cultural Business: Henry Villard and German Investment in the United States
A financier and investor, Henry Villard helped realize many important infrastructure ventures in the U.S. and in the process made and lost several fortunes. Read More »
George Christian Gebelein
A first generation immigrant, George Gebelein earned acclaim for the superb quality of his handcrafted silver products, finding success as a craftsman in an era when mass-produced goods had replaced handcrafted products. Read More »
Otto Y. Schnering
Nicknamed the “U.S. Candy Bar King,” Otto Y. Schnering used his personal sales skills and understanding of advertising and marketing to build the Curtiss Candy Company in Chicago and the post–World War I United States chocolate candy industry into modern, successful enterprises. Read More »
Marcus Loew
As a pioneer of the mass-entertainment industry of the early twentieth century, Marcus Loew engaged in everything from penny arcades to nickelodeons, vaudeville, and silent film. Read More »
Alfred Lion
Alfred Lion immigrated to the United States in 1936 and went on to found one of the world’s foremost jazz record labels, Blue Note Records with his longtime friend Francis Wolff. Read More »
Lillian Vernon
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Germany, Lillian came to the U.S. as a child after escaping from the Nazi regime of the 1930s. With an entrepreneurial spirit inherited from a family of businessmen, the “Queen of Catalogs” built her mail-order empire from scratch. Read More »
Immigrant Entrepreneurship on Facebook
Immigrant Entrepreneurship has now joined Facebook. Please feel free to "like" the project there and comment on the latest content. We'll post links to our latest articles, project news and events, as well as share links to interesting news articles relating to the project. Read More »
Welcome to Immigrant Entrepreneurship
Immigrant entrepreneurship was one of the decisive factors in the United States' rise as an economic superpower in the late nineteenth century. The country benefited from the relative openness and freedom that attracted talent from around the world and encouraged minorities who fled discrimination elsewhere to try their luck.
The collaborative research project Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present explores the entrepreneurial and economic capacity of immigrants by investigating the German-American example in the United States. It traces the lives, careers, and business ventures of German-American businesspeople of roughly the last two hundred and ninety years, integrating the history of German-American immigration into the larger narrative of U.S. economic and business history. This online biographical dictionary synthesizes the results of the collaborative research project with a large collection of archival materials. The project is also a work in progress. New materials and essays will be added on a continual basis as the project expands. Continue Reading about the project...
