Are reference works still needed in this age of digital reproduction, when there are more than five million English language entries in Wikipedia? Their function has changed, surely. With so much information available online, printed reference books need higher justifications, not merely the collection and collocation of information, but presenting it in new and imaginative ways that give its users insights, as well as a pleasurable reading experience. In other words, reference works need to become reference books.

Two recent business and economics reference books try to make the case for the continued relevance of paper-based reference works. Robert E. Wright and Richard Sylla, two distinguished historians of American business, have written a cross between a coffee-table and a reference book, Genealogy of American Finance, weighing in at 4.4 pounds and 12.2 by 10.3 inches. It is not a history but a genealogy, sort of a fancy name for an encyclopedia, but one limited to fifty entries, one apiece for the fifty largest financial firms in the United States as of 2013. The volume is a product of prodigious research and was produced in collaboration with the Museum of American Finance. It is a lavishly illustrated volume, reproducing many stock certificates at or near full size, along with large numbers of historical photographs. Entries contain a family pedigree of each firm, sometimes sprawling over several pages. Each corporate family tree details an often numbingly complex series of mergers, acquisitions, and divestments—with all of their May–December romances, “shotgun” marriages, and divorces—that is the history of American finance.

The individual histories of what the authors call the “big 50” of American finance are the main contributions. They are arranged alphabetically, from Ally Financial (the new name for what for many decades was called the General Motors Acceptance Corporation) to Zions Bancorporation (founded by Brigham Young in 1873 and owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints until 1960). In terms of their size, they range from JPMorgan Chase (current assets, $2.4 trillion) to Synovus Financial, with assets of $26.5 billion. (If one corporation is 90 times the size of another, can one really speak of both of them as being in the “big 50”? There is a gap of almost $300 billion in assets between the smallest of the “big 6”—consisting of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—and the largest of the “not quite so big 44.”)

In addition to the genealogical table, the authors provide each of the corporations with a short history, ranging from about one thousand to five thousand or so words, depending on the complexity of the corporate history. They are written in a fairly relaxed and informal style, at a remove from the standard encyclopediaese of most reference writing, and yet are largely free of overt opining (though the authors' point of view on most matters is generally clear). It's a nice combination. For anyone wanting relatively short, authoritative histories of America's largest financial corporations, there is no better place to turn.

One of the joys of the volume is the ease with which it can be used for corporate prosopography. A table of “industry of origin” of the fifty corporations shows how far we have come from the days of Glass-Steagall, with only two of the firms treated in the volume beginning life as an investment bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, along with two brokerages, Charles Schwab and E*Trade. Thirty-five of the firms started as commercial banks, along with two express companies, two dispensers of credit cards, three insurance companies, a miscellaneous finance company, and three firms that began life as the finance arms of manufacturing companies.

As the Genealogy of American Finance reveals, the fifty largest firms are both very old and very new. Financial firms have a unique degree of corporate stability, with their histories typically measured not in decades but centuries. The authors provide a helpful table of the “earliest known ancestors” of the fifty firms. Seven date from the eighteenth century. (However, it remains unclear to me, after reading their corporate histories and examining the genealogies, why the authors date Wells Fargo to 1782 and Bank of America to 1784.) On the other side, only eight of the firms were formed after 1900, and only one, Charles Schwab, after World War II. (None of the firms were created in the current century.) Half of the fifty firms were originally organized between the turn of the nineteenth century and the end of the American Civil War, a golden era for the formation of commercial banks.

And yet in addition to finance's unique “creative inertia” there is the requisite amount of destruction and rearrangement, with most of the firms included here having acquired new names, partners, subsidiaries, and functions over the last quarter century. (Goldman Sachs and the two one-time express companies, American Express and Wells Fargo, are the only firms whose names date to the nineteenth century.) The volume captures both the solidity and the impermanence of the structures of America's largest financial firms. Only thirteen of the firms are headquartered in New York City (though Manhattan is still home to six of the top ten firms). But other firms are located, from Maine to Hawaii, in twenty-five other states and upstate New York. In addition, eleven of the firms are American subsidiaries of foreign corporations, with two parent companies located in Canada, one in Japan, and the remainder in Western Europe. Like all great reference works, the more time you spend perusing its pages, the more insights and curious nuggets of fact you will acquire.

I do have a few concerns. The authors state that the book has entries on the “nation's 50 largest bank holding companies” (p. 3). If so, they probably should have called the book the “Genealogy of American Bank Holding Companies” and not the Genealogy of American Finance. Missing are the largest hedge funds; privately owned, government-sponsored entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and some of the largest insurance companies such as MetLife. Their inclusion would have given readers a more complete genealogy of American finance.

As the authors note, the parallel with corporate histories and family trees breaks down when one considers that the offspring of banking firms can number in the thousands—12,000 banks are part of the “family tree” of Wells Fargo alone. Of course they had to be selective in including firms on the genealogical tables. But too often I found that some of the firms mentioned in the corporate histories did not make their way into the genealogical pedigrees. Why, for instance, isn't the Bank of the Manhattan Company, founded in 1799, the oldest component of JPMorgan Chase, included in its genealogical table? It is only represented by the Chase Manhattan Bank, N.A., founded in 1955, the cat that ate the Bank of Manhattan canary. A related concern is that, given the complexity of these histories, an index would have been helpful in finding some of the merged banks and firms.

Perhaps the authors could have included, possibly in an appendix, some of the firms, with immensely complex histories of their own, that are no longer around. The authors praise the fifty firms that survive “as victors in a 225-year Darwinian struggle for existence” (p. 7). This may be so—though it seems more a matter of the “survival of the biggest” rather than the “survival of the fittest.” In any event history is made by losers as well as by winners, and I think readers would have appreciated accounts of some of the more notable failures, such as Lehman Brothers. Finally, there are places where I found the corporate histories a bit too narrowly focused on finance and would have liked to see a bit more of the outside world impinging. The history of Deutsche Bank discusses the impact of Nazism on its history, but few of the accounts of American banks include details on some of the less savory aspects of American history and finance—such as support for slavery, toleration for racism and anti-Semitism, and so on. But these minor cavils aside, Genealogy of American Finance is a remarkable and durable achievement, definitive and magisterial.

Another recent financial and economic reference book is Quentin R. Skrabec Jr.'s The 100 Most Important American Financial Crises, arranged chronologically from Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676 to Detroit's bankruptcy in 2013. As compared to Wright and Sylla's lavishly illustrated volume, The 100 Most Important American Financial Crises has modest production values, with few illustrations, a less expensive, less glossy grade of paper, and in general a less prepossessing layout. But the one hundred histories are well-written, short accounts of the events in question. There is some bibliography, but no attempt to review the scholarly literature.

The biggest problem I have with the book is the overall conceit. There are not one hundred “important American financial crises” and the author had to do a bit of scrounging around to come up with the requisite number. And this problem is compounded when he gives each of the one hundred events relatively equal coverage, so the “Wall Street Crash and Great Depression” of 1929 merits only a slightly longer entry than the “Peanut Import Crisis” of 1922. (I don't know if there is a clear distinction between a “financial crisis” and an “economic crisis” affecting a particular industry, but many of the author's financial crises seem to be of the latter variety.) The author would have been better advised to limit himself to the really significant American financial crises, let's say about fifteen or twenty, and write about them at greater length.

Since the Great Depression and the Great Recession have been written about ad infinitum and ad nauseam, as so often is the case for reference works, it is the smaller, less obvious entries that are the most interesting parts of the volume, such as the aforementioned peanut crisis, the whale oil crisis of the 1850s, and radial tire crisis of the late 1960s. (The author is an expert on the American rubber industry, and he has provided a somewhat rubberized history of American financial crises, with rubber accounting for four of the one hundred crises.) Other industries are underrepresented—the railroads, surprisingly, only have one entry entirely to themselves, the 1877 railroad strike. I was surprised that the Erie Railroad Wars of the 1860s and the Penn Central bankruptcy of 1976 were omitted. Other omissions that concerned me were the agricultural contraction of the 1920s (before 1929), and the several extended postwar bear markets, such as the so-called “Kennedy Slide of 1962” and the recession in 1973 and 1974. Why wasn't New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975 included? And a volume of this sort should have had a more extensive treatment of the slave trade, slavery, and the difficult economic conditions in the postbellum South.

And some of the crises Skrabec included hardly pass muster. Was that “Y2 K Crisis” really a crisis at all? And whatever you think about the famous 1947 Mont Pelerin Society meeting of conservative free-market economists (Skrabec clearly is an admirer), it certainly was not a financial crisis. (Nor was its impact “far greater in the United States than the Great Depression and America's wars” [p. 169].) The author tries to squeeze it into his rubric as “a crisis in economic thought and academia,” but it's not an elegant fit. The author seems partial to free-market economists, but it is a stretch to say that “John Maynard Keynes would be discredited somewhat by the Great Depression and the world war that followed” (p. 169). I had thought this was precisely the period when Keynes, especially after the 1936 publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, achieved his greatest influence. Skrabec goes on to suggest, outlandishly, that by the 1980s, Keynesians were seen at major universities as having the same intellectual repute as creationists. But the author's anti-Keynesian animus aside, the volume offers a useful and breezy introduction to some of the major events in American financial history.