Professor Blackford is a specialist in business history whose current work deals with the history of the business firm and its relationship to social and political changes occurring in Great Britain, the United States, and Japan. Author of The Politics of Business in California, 1890-1920 (1977); Pioneering a Modern Small Business: Wakefield Seafoods and the Alaskan Frontier (1979); A Portrait Cast in Steel: Buckeye International and Columbus, Ohio, 1881-1980 (1982); Business Enterprise in American History, co-authored with K. Austin Kerr (1986); The Rise of Modern Business in Great Britain, the United States and Japan (1988); Local Businesses: Exploring their History, co-authored with Amos Loveday and K. Austin Kerr (1990); A History of Small Business in America(1991); The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast (1993); BFGoodrich: Tradition and Transformation, 1870-1995 (1996), co-authored with K. Austin Kerr, and Fragile Paradise: The Impact of Tourism on Maui, 1959-2000 (2001). He has edited On Board the U.S.S. Mason: The World War II Diary of James A. Dunn (1996).