Leonard Goldenson
Goldenson orchestrated the merger of United Paramount Theatres with ABC in 1953 (after Paramount was ordered to spin it off in the wake of "United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.", a 1948 decree of the U.S. Supreme Court). ABC was originally formed in 1943 in the wake of an earlier Supreme Court decree effectively ordering the spinoff of the largely secondary-status "Blue Network" from its then-parent, NBC; its buyer, industrialist Edward J. Noble, tried to build ABC into a competitive Broadcasting company, but by 1951 was rumored to be on the verge of selling the nearly bankrupt operation to CBS, whose management apparently wanted ABC's critically important owned-and-operated television stations.
ABC-CLIO
ABC-CLIO was founded in 1953 as a privately held corporation by Eric Boehm with its first publication, "Historical Abstracts". The name represents the company's two original divisions when it incorporated in 1969: ABC stands for American Bibliographical Center and CLIO Press is named after Clio, the muse of history from ancient Greek mythology. According to Boehm, he had always been interested in history so when he noticed that there were not many good historical abstracting services available, he started publishing the "Historical Abstracts".
During the 1960s, a sister bibliographic and abstract publication on American history was added, "America: History and Life", which was considered an award-winning title. The company entered into digital publishing with electronic data in the 1960s and in 1975, it published its first online database called "DIALOG". During the 1980s, ABC-CLIO expanded into providing primary reference books such as encyclopedias and dictionaries and stopped publishing bibliographic books. In the 1990s, ABC-CLIO began to provide access to its humanities database on CD-ROM. The "Exegy Current Events" CD-ROM was named "Best Disc of the Year" by Library Journal. In 1998, ABC-CLIO provided electronic access to "America: History and Life". By the 2000s, one of the company's most popular products had become online databases for researching many topics in the field of the humanities. In 2001, ABC-CLIO began to publish eBooks, initially providing 150 different titles to schools and libraries. The company's reference books had won numerous awards, and the company started a series of subject-related online databases for secondary school use. In 2004, the company acquired the quarterly historical journal, "Journal of the West", which has been published since 1962.
In 1996, ABC-CLIO merged with an electronic publishing company, Intellimation, which also produced educational software. The merger brought Becky Snyder, ABC-CLIO's current president, from Intellimation. It sold "Historical Abstracts" and "America: History and Life" to EBSCO Publishing in 2007.