author
Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger) Blackford
1875–1916
A pioneer of early personnel management, she wrote popular books that promised to read character from faces, posture, and behavior. Her work captures a curious moment when business efficiency, self-help, and pseudoscience overlapped in the early 20th century.
1 Audiobook
Analyzing Character The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social Life
by Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger) Blackford, Arthur Newcomb
About the author
Born in Kansas in 1875 as Katherine Melvina Huntsinger, she became known as Katherine M. H. Blackford and built a career as a writer and consultant focused on hiring, workplace efficiency, and what she called "character analysis." She worked during a period when American industry was eager for systems that claimed to make business more scientific.
Blackford is best remembered for books such as The Job, the Man, the Boss and Analyzing Character, written with Arthur Newcomb. In them, she argued that employers could judge temperament and ability by close observation of physical features and mannerisms. Those ideas were widely read in their time, especially by readers interested in management and self-improvement.
Today, her work is interesting both as an early chapter in the history of human resources and as a window into ideas that modern readers would treat with skepticism. Even so, her books remain valuable for anyone curious about how personality testing, workplace selection, and popular psychology developed in the early 1900s.