McGraw-Hill is an information conglomerate that, through its various subsidiary companies, offers financial services, educational tools, and information and media services. Most people will recognize the company from the textbooks it publishes and from its ownership of the major financial company Standard & Poor's.
McGraw-Hill was founded in 1909 by upstate New York teacher/publisher James H. McGraw and technical editor John A. Hill. The two men had been working together sporadically on publishing projects in previous years; they were united because of their mutual interests in science and technology.
The first business the pair founded was the McGraw-Hill Book Company. Despite Hill's untimely death in 1916, the corporation rapidly expanded, acquiring newspapers and other publications and founding offices across the United States and in Great Britain.
Ironically, McGraw-Hill's stock went public in 1929, just in time for the stock market collapse and the Great Depression. However, the company survived in fine style; their seminal publication BusinessWeek was also launched in 1929.
In recent decades, the corporation has expanded tremendously and is currently focusing on e-commerce in addition to its mainstay involvement in educational and financial publishing. Under the leadership of current CEO Harold W. McGraw III, the corporation had $4 billion in revenue in 1999.
McGraw-Hill encompasses: