The Bulletin aimed "to encourage and aid the study of the evolution of business in all periods and in all countries" and devoted much space to describing the growing archival collections of Harvard's Baker Library.

Henrietta Larson,[2] whose Guide to Business History (1948)[3] also documented the scope of available research materials, was editor from 1938 to 1953.

In these years, the intellectual framework of the field of business history was defined by the work of Alfred D. Chandler Jr., who published 11 research articles in the journal.

One of the most popular (with 212 Google Scholar cites) was his 1959 piece "The Beginnings of 'Big Business' in American Industry", which explored the question of why large, vertically integrated corporations were formed in the late nineteenth-century and why they took the structure they did.

Included in the issue was an article on oil companies operating in South America by Mira Wilkins,[5] who pioneered the field of international business history.