Norman S.B. Gras papers

Norman Scott Brien Gras was born July 18, 1884 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and spent most of his youth in Ridgeton, Ontario. Gras earned his undergraduate degree in 1906 from the University of Western Ontario. Emigrating to the United States, he entered Harvard University, studied under Edwin F. Gay, America’s first economic historian, and earned his doctorate in 1909. Gras traveled to Europe following graduation and returned to begin his academic career at Clark University. After holding junior faculty positions at Clark, he became full professor of Economic History at the University of Minnesota in 1918.

Increasingly respected as a leading scholar in his field, Gras eventually yielded to repeated attempts to entice him to join the Harvard Business School faculty. His former mentor, Edwin F. Gay, introduced him to Dean Wallace Donham, and in September 1927, Gras accepted a faculty appointment. As the first Isidore Straus Professor in Business History, Gras taught a class in business history as well as editing the Harvard Studies in Business History from 1928-1932. In addition, he organized the Business History Foundation, the purpose of which was to research and write the history of large corporations in America, and he served as its president from 1949-1956. Professionally, Gras was active in the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the Economic Society of England, and the Medieval Academy of America. He retired from the faculty of Harvard Business School in 1950.

Norman S. B. Gras married Ethel G. Culbert, a scholar in her own right, in 1915; the couple had four children. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 9, 1956.