EBHA Summer School

Every other year, the European Business History Association (EBHA) sponsors a Doctoral Summer School; the 2017 edition was held in Ancona, Italy in early September. Adam Nix has written a report about the meetings for the Organizational History Network blog. As he explains,

the school constitutes the EBHA’s main effort in their aim to develop the academic discipline of business history. The school seeks to attract talented junior historians and social scientists to the broad scope of business history, encouraging further study of the history of organizations, markets and the people impacted by them. The school, fundamentally international in nature, has developed a reputation for facilitating long lasting friendships within the field and providing a safe, friendly, but ultimately rigorous atmosphere within which to promote and engage with doctoral research.

Keynote speakers were Franco Amatori (Bocconi University), Harold James (Princeton University), and Grietjie Verhoef (University of Johannesburg); faculty members were Marten Boon (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Ludovic Cailluet (EDHEC Business School), Andrea Colli (Bocconi University), Abe de Jong (Rotterdam School of Management), Jeffrey Fear (University of Glasgow), Andrea Schneider (Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte), and Ben Wubs (Erasmus University).
    EBHS president Ludovic Cailluet emphasizes that the school is open to all nationalities, and he encourages North American students to apply when information about the 2019 session becomes available.

Business History/Historians at the 2018 AHA: Program Available

The 2018 annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) will take place in Washington, D.C., on January 4-7. The program has now been posted online at the meeting website.
    The Business History Conference has three sponsored events as an AHA-affiliated society: two sessions and a luncheon:

Session 73: "Ideologies of Industrialization in the Early American Republic"
[No session number]: "Peddling Print in 19th-Century America: Subscription Publishing as a Business Model"
BHC Luncheon: "Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism: Perspectives from Business History"

In addition, many other sessions feature business history and historians. The AHA program site allows users to search for papers in a variety of ways, including key words; searches on "business" and "capital" return dozens of papers--too many to list here. A few of particular interest:

Session 19: "Knowledge Production and Economic Life in the Long Gilded Age"
Session 150: "Race, Risk, and Capitalism in the Twentieth-Century United States"
Session 159: "Teaching Capitalism"
Session 193: "Records and Revolutions: The Music Industry as an Agent of Change"
Session 228: "Revolutionaries, Refugees, and Smugglers: New Directions in Inter-American Exchanges during the Age of Revolution"
Session 266: "The US Military as an Economic Institution since World War II"
Session 274: "Black Economic Internationalism in the 20th Century"

Research Source: Sarnoff Collection at Hagley Opens

After three years of processing, preserving, and cataloging, Hagley Library announced this week that the contents of the David Sarnoff Library collection are now fully available to the public, including 700 digital images available through the Hagley Digital Archives. The collection includes thousands of linear feet of documents, reports, photographs, films, and publications detailing the rise and fall of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and of Sarnoff, its longtime leader.
    In December 2013, Hagley Library was awarded a $291,500 grant by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to process and make accessible the collections of the David Sarnoff Library. Employing two project archivists, Daniel Michelson and Kenneth Cleary, a number of graduate assistants and interns from the University of Delaware, and occupying a number of its library staff, Hagley completed the David Sarnoff Library Processing Project in May 2017.
    “Hagley is proud of its work to preserve this collection documenting an iconic and innovative American business and the man who led that business for multiple decades,” said Erik Rau, director of library services at Hagley. “The collection includes materials donated by more than one hundred individuals and companies resulting in tens of thousands of individually cataloged reports and publications. We invite the public to explore this incredible collection on our website and at the library.”
    In the early 1960s, Sarnoff opened a library in the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, N.J., to house his private papers and focus on his contributions to the communications and electronics industries; the David Sarnoff Collection (as it was then known) opened in late September 1967. The collection developed further with the acquisition of papers of former RCA executives, scientists, and engineers. However, the Sarnoff Corporation closed the library in 2009, following the onset of the Great Recession. Hagley obtained the Sarnoff Collection records shortly thereafter.

Reminder: BHC 2018 Proposals Due October 2

We remind everyone that the deadline for submissions to the program committee for the 2018 Business History Conference annual meeting is October 2, 2017. The meeting will be held on April 5-7, 2018, in Baltimore, Maryland. The theme will be "Money, Finance, and Capital." For the full call for papers and additional information about paper competitions, the dissertation session, and BHC policies, please see the BHC Annual Meeting website.

CFP: Research Competition on US Scientists and Engineers in World War I

David Hounshell of Carnegie Mellon University, who is serving as chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on World War I and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) /National Research Council (NRC): A Research Competition, sends word of a scholarly competition for younger researchers. He writes,

the committee is pleased to announce an open competition for scholars under the age of 30 to research and write a scholarly paper on a major aspect of how scientists and engineers in the United States were engaged in the World War I effort. The focus, drawing on the NAS’s creation of the National Research Council as a response to the United States’ expected involvement in World War I, is on institutional changes (e.g., the charter of the NRC) and the research enterprise in America. In effect, scholars should look at how the war experience shaped long-term relationships among scientists and engineers and U.S. policymakers regarding national security and public welfare. The winner of the competition will be awarded a $10,000 prize.

Please note that a research grant in the amount of $5,000 will be available to five scholars who submit the most compelling proposals prior to December 1, 2017. Additional information about the competition, as well as the formal request for proposals, may be found on the competition website.

CFP: SHEAR 2018

The 40th annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) will take place on July 18-22, 2018, in Cleveland, Ohio. The program committee invites proposals for sessions and papers exploring all aspects of and approaches to the history and culture of the early American republic, c. 1776-1861. Particularly encouraged are submissions that

• reflect the diversity of the past, but also address the most pressing issues of the present;
• fill gaps in the historical narrative and/or historiography;
• focus on pedagogy, public history, digital humanities, and other alternative methodologies;
• foster audience participation, feature pre-circulated papers, or assess the state of a given field.

Individual proposals will be considered, but the program committee gives priority to proposals for complete panels that include a chair and commentator, though the committee reserves the right to alter and rearrange proposed panels and participants. Proposals should be prepared according to the guidelines available under the “Annual Meeting” menu on the website.

The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2017. Proposals should be submitted by email to the program committee co-chairs at shear2018@gmail.com with “SHEAR2018” in the subject line.

For more details, please see the SHEAR annual meeting website.

Recent Prizes, Awards, and Recognition for Business Historians

A few non-BHC awards and honors for folks in the general field of business history:

The World History Association announced that Jonathan Eacott of the University of California Riverside is the co-winner of its 2017 Bentley Book Prize for Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830.

The Business History Review Editorial Advisory Board has announced that the winner of the 2016 Henrietta Larson Article Award (for the best article in BHR) is Sean H. Vanatta of Princeton University for "Citibank, Credit Cards, and the Local Politics of National Consumer Finance, 1968–1991" (Spring 2016): 57-80. The Vanatta article is currently free to access on Cambridge Core.

Gautham Rau of American University has been named as the new editor of the Law and History Review.

Kenneth Lipartito has been named to the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review; his primary responsibility is modern U.S. history, and he encourages business historians to submit articles to the AHR, "which is increasingly interested in works dealing with economy, business, and capitalism."

Julia Ott of the New School has been named to the Editorial Board of Dissent. She is also the co-director of the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School, which has just received a million-dollar grant to further its programs.

Jessica Ann Levy of Johns Hopkins University has been awarded the Jefferson Scholar/Hagley Library Fellowship in Business and Politics for 2017, the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library has announced. Her dissertation, “From Black Power to Black Empowerment: American Business and the Return of Racial Uplift in the United States and Africa, 1964–1994,” examines the investments made by American business people, government officials, and black entrepreneurs on two continents in promoting free enterprise and reorienting black activism toward the market.

Charles Read, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, was awarded both the 2017 Thirsk-Feinstein Dissertation Prize and the T.S. Ashton Prize for the best article in the Economic History Review.

CFP: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Annual Conference

The next annual conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC) will be held in Williamsburg, Virginia, on June 14-17, 2018. The meeting will celebrate the Omohundro Institute’s 75th anniversary and will assess the past, present, and potential futures for the practices of early American History.
     Proposals are welcome that consider all aspects of early American history, which the OIEAHC takes to include "the adjoining oceans and seas and both continents of the Americas and all of the peoples who lived on or traveled across those waters and territories." Proposals that highlight digital tools, methods, and scholarly projects are also encouraged. Please see the call for papers for more details about the four different format options for sessions: research panels, roundtables, posters, and workshops.
      For questions regarding the proposal process,  please contact Martha Howard at Martha.Howard@wm.edu or 757-221-1115. All proposals, which are to be submitted online, are due by September 29, 2017.

New Books of Interest, Late Summer Edition

More new and forthcoming books of interest to business and economic historians, July-September 2017 (and a few we missed):

Antonella Alimento and Koen Stapelbroek, eds., The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century: Balance of Power, Balance of Trade (Palgrave, September 2016)

Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Harvard University Press, September 2017)

David R. Bellhouse, Leases for Lives: Life Contingent Contracts and the Emergence of Actuarial Science in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, July 2017)

Cary Carson, Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America (University of Virginia Press, August 2017)

Theodore Catton, Rainy Lake House: Twilight of Empire on the Northern Frontier (Johns Hopkins University Press, August 2017)

Eli Cook, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (Harvard University Press, September 2017)

Aled Davies, The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain (Oxford University Press, August 2017)

Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (Columbia University Press, August 2017)

Marian Mathison Desrosiers, John Bannister of Newport: The Life and Accounts of a Colonial Merchant (McFarland, July 2017; pb original)

Peter J. Drake, Merchants, Bankers, Governors: British Enterprise in Singapore and Malaya, 1786–1920 (World Scientific, September 2017)

William M. Fowler, Jr., Steam Titans: Cunard, Collins, and the Epic Battle for Commerce on the North Atlantic (Bloomsbury Publishing, August 2017)

Anthony C. Hotson, Respectable Banking: The Search for Stability in London's Banking and Credit Markets since 1695 (Cambridge University Press, July 2017)

Louis Hyman and Joseph Tohill, eds., Shopping for Change: Consumer Activism and the Possibilities of Purchasing Power (Cornell University Press, June 2017)

Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (Columbia University Press, July 2017)

Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women (Sourcebooks, May 2017) 

Amanda Porterfield, Darren Grem, and John Corrigan, eds., The Business Turn in American Religious History (Oxford University Press, August 2017)

Gideon Reuveni, Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (Cambridge University Press, August 2017)

George Robb, Ladies of the Ticker: Women and Wall Street from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression (University of Illinois Press, September 2017)

Augustus J. Veenendaal, Jr., Smoke over Oklahoma: The Railroad Photographs of Preston George (University of Oklahoma Press, January 2017)

James Wadsworth, ed., The World of Credit in Colonial Massachusetts: James Richards and His Day Book, 1692-1711 (University of Massachusetts Press, September 2017; pb original)

Robert E. Weems, Jr., and Jason Chambers, eds., Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, September 2017)

Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford University Press, September 2017)

CFP: “(En)gendering the Atlantic World”

The faculty and students of the Atlantic World Workshop at New York University announce their upcoming conference, “(En)gendering the Atlantic World,” to be held at NYU on April 20-21, 2018. This conference is open to scholars of all ranks, as well as the public. According to the call for papers,

Over the last five decades, historians have demonstrated that focusing on gender enables a deeper understanding of the diversity of human experience, ideologies, and epistemologies that shaped the Atlantic World. This conference aims to convene emerging and established scholars whose work speaks to gender in the Atlantic World between 1400 and 1800. While we welcome papers on any aspect of gender in the Atlantic World, we particularly encourage those that situate enslaved and Native actors within the broader Atlantic context, as well as those that critically consider imperial structures and the archival challenges they produce. 

Among possible topics of specific interest here are

• Science, Technology, Medicine, Environment 
• Commerce, Capitalism, Trade 
• Cultural Production, Material and Sartorial Culture, Consumption 
• Race, Slavery, Commodification 
• Labor and Work 

Individual submissions of papers twenty minutes in length are invited. Proposals should include a 200-300 word prospectus and a one-page CV. Please email submissions to Lila Chambers (lila.chambers@nyu.edu) AND Elise A. Mitchell (elise.mitchell@nyu.edu) by October 15, 2017.

Please see the full call for papers for additional information.