The Exchange

The Department of History at Wichita State University invites applications for the Willard W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History at the associate or full professor level.    The Garvey Professor will be a senior scholar with a distinguished record of research in American Business History, and will be expected to maintain an excellent research and publication program. In addition, the Garvey Professor will be expected to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the field of specialty, as well as direct M.A. theses, in an urban-serving university with a diverse student population. The teaching load is two courses per semester. It is further expected that he/she will take advantage of the opportunity to teach courses, usually one per academic year, for the W. Frank Barton School of Business .    The successful candidate must hold a doctorate, have credentials appropriate for appointment as a distinguished tenured professor, and demo...

At its recent annual meeting in Boston, the Council of the American Historical Association acted favorably on the application of the Business History Conference to become an affiliated society of the AHA. BHC members Pamela W. Laird of the University of Colorado Denver and Michele Alacevich of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University collected and prepared the necessary information for the application process . In the words of the AHA statement on affiliated societies: The Association's goal in establishing this broad network of organizations is to promote collaboration and communication across the wide history community. . . . Historians work in an extraordinary range of settings: in museums and libraries and government agencies, in schools and academic institutions, in corporations and non-profit organizations. . . . We welcome affiliated societies that represent this diversity of professional workplaces and practices, as well as th...

The Hagley Museum and Library this month unveiled the "Avon Historical Archive," a digital collection of materials on the history of the well-known cosmetic company. Created with the cooperation of Avon in commemoration of the company's 125th anniversary, the web exhibit "provides insights into the development of the business and touches on important issues around the history of women as both consumers and entrepreneurs. The collection will be a treasure trove for historians interested in women’s history, as well as the development of packaging, advertising, and branding." The searchable materials can be accessed by topic—advertising, catalogs, representatives, the company—and by time period.

A reminder that proposals for the 2012 meeting of the American Historical Association, to be held January 5-8 in Chicago, Illinois, are due on February 15 . The theme of the meeting is "Communities and Networks."  As described by the organizers: The term “Communities” points to an interest in the formation of groups—ranging from the level of families and villages to institutional communities, such as confessional groups, corporations, and universities and to nations, empires, and virtual communities. The term “Networks” asks us to look at the linkages that tie and hold together all these communities. It refers to all types of intercon-nectivity, ranging from transportation, communication, and technology networks to all kinds of group relationships, such as mercantile partnerships and intellectual collaborations. These tightly interrelated topics can be approached from a number of methodological angles, ranging from the methods of social, cultural, or intellectual h...

The Social Science History Association (SSHA) will hold its annual meeting on November 17-20, 2011, in Boston, Massachusetts. The theme this year is "Generation to Generation." The participation of graduate students and recent Ph.D.s, as well as more-established scholars, from a wide range of disciplines and departments is encouraged. The call for papers states: The 2011 Program Committee encourages panel proposals examining exchanges between generations across time and space. Every social system is characterized by flows of services, goods, and ideas between parents and children/old and young at individual, community, and national scales. How has the transmission of wealth, knowledge, and culture changed? What are the modes and rhythms of exchange between generations? How are generational exchanges mediated and modified by institutions and the state? How are hierarchies of gender and age linked to generational succession? How do the time-specific experiences of ...

The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (Knopf, 2010), by Alan Brinkley , Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, will be the focus of a roundtable discussion at the upcoming BHC meeting. The book, which is not only a biography, but an examination of Luce's impact on the magazine publishing industry and on America's self-image, has received widespread media attention. It has been reviewed extensively, including in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (accompanied by a podcast interview with Brinkley) and by Janet Maslin in "Books of the Times "; in The Economist , The Atlantic , the Wall Street Journal , and by NPR's "Fresh Air." Professor Brinkley can be seen discussing the book with Sam Tanenhaus on C-Span's BookTV (and on C-Span again at the 2010 OAH meeting), and at Yale University via YouTube . There is also an interview with NPR's "On the Media," which can be read or heard, and one with Blo...

The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts, reminds us that the deadline for receipt of proposals for its upcoming conference "Before Madison Avenue: Advertising in Early America," to be held November 4-5, 2011, is February 1 . The conference, which is co-sponsored by CHAViC and by the Center for the History of the Book at the AAS, seeks to present new research on advertising in North America before the rise of the modern advertising agency in the late 1870s. The call for papers states: . . . before the rise of the modern advertising agency, . . . advertising saturated the media of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America. From newspaper agate print to trade cards to broadsides to posters, ads were everywhere in early America, helping to support the rise of entire sectors of the publishing industry and introducing Americans to the ever-expanding world of goods and services th...

Over at The Historical Society's blog , Dan Allosso has posted two interesting pieces on “Reading Primary Sources.” The first deals with indentures and the second with estate inventories . He provides a hands-on description of his work with these documents, the uses to which they can be put, and the ideas for further research they suggest.    Those who wish to use original indenture and estate documents for teaching purposes can find a number of them online. For example: Virtual Jamestown has a database of over 15,000 indentured servants' contracts from the London, Middlesex, and Bristol Registers. Lowcountry Africana is in the process of digitizing estate records and bills of sale from South Carolina, 1732-1872. The Center for History and New Media houses a database collected by Gunston Hall Plantation of over 300 probate inventories from Maryland and Virginia, 1740-1810. In addition to these larger sites, many genealogy pages, museums, and state and local archives ha...

The program, registration, and reservation materials for the Business History Conference meeting in St. Louis, which will take place March 31-April 2, 2011, have been posted at the BHC meeting website .  As Secretary-Treasurer Roger Horowitz said in his message to members, Our 2011 annual meeting takes “Knowledge” as its theme in keeping with the recent expansion in the mandate of the BHC to embrace not only the dynamics of business decision-making, but also the relationship of economic institutions to culture, politics, and society. . . . The meeting will open at 5 p.m. Thursday with a plenary session entitled "Knowledge: Institutions and Ideas." It will feature talks by Douglass C. North (Washington University in St. Louis), David A. Hounshell (Carnegie Mellon University), and Rakesh Khurana (Harvard Business School). We will continue all day Friday and Saturday with a jam-packed schedule of 170 papers. Please go to the BHC meeting pages for additional information...

The program for the 2011 meeting of the Economic History Society has now been posted.  The meeting will be held 1-3 April 2011 at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. Of special interest may be sessions IIF, on "Economic History and Business History," IVC, "Business History I," and VC, "Business History II." Hans-Joachim Voth, of the University Pompeu Fabra, will deliver the Tawney Lecture .   The online registration system for the meeting is also operational. The conference booklet, containing abstracts and some full papers, will be available in advance of the meeting.

Each summer, the Gilder Lehrman Institute sponsors a series of week-long seminars for teachers.  Full-time K-12 teachers, as well as National Park Service (NPS) interpreters and museum educators are eligible to attend. In addition, principals, curriculum specialists, and media specialists may apply if they have responsibility for making American history materials available. Community College faculty are eligible to attend high-school-level seminars. The 2011 seminars include David Kennedy, "The Great Depression and World War II," June 19-25, 2011, Stanford University Richard Sylla, "Economic and Financial Crises in American History," July 31-August 6, 2011, Ohio Wesleyan University Richard White, "The Gilded Age and Its Modern Parallels," July 31-August 6, 2011, Stanford University A complete list of seminars can be found here , applications and eligibility requirem...

Hagley Museum and Library has recently uploaded 270 images for dissemination through the Bridgeman Art Library .  The Hagley's collection available through Bridgeman can be browsed here .  The Bridgeman Art Library, which charges a fee for images used (but not browsed), serves primarily as a central source for authors, publishers, and others needing high-quality illustrative materials.  It represents many artists, museums, libraries, and galleries.

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) has now posted the program for its 2011 meeting, which will be held March 17-20 in Houston, Texas. Many full sessions and specific papers will be of interest to business and economic historians: Thursday Sessions: "History of Technology: State of the Field," chaired by Stephen Usselman(40) "Out of Bounds: Expanding the Modes and Means of American Consumption, 1900-1965" (43) Friday Sessions: "Work, Consumption, and the Question of Agency" (45) "Eyes on the Market: Surveillance in the American Economy," chaired by Walter Friedman (46) "Historians and the Public Interest: Agendas for the Study of Modern Political Economy," a discussion moderated by Edward Balleisen, with Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Neil Fligstein, and David Moss (51) Saturday Sessions: "Ten Years after the Enron Scandal: Historical Perspective on the Company's Origins and Growth," chaired by Naomi Lamoreaux a...

The European State Finance Database (ESFD), originally developed in the 1990s, has been recently relaunched in an enhanced form. The co-managers of the site are D'Maris Coffman, Centre for Financial History, Newnham College, University of Cambridge, and Anne Murphy (University of Hertfordshire). The ESFD is "an international collaborative research project for the collection, archiving, and dissemination of data on European fiscal history across the medieval, early modern, and modern periods." A full introduction and history of the project is available on the ESFD site.    The wide-ranging data, which are provided voluntarily by researchers, include such datasets as Herbert Klein's work with the Colegio de Mexico on the finances of New Spain, 1590-1810; "Annual Sugar Consumption in England, 1731-1780"; "Value (in francs) of cash reserves in the Banque de France, 1799-1834"; and many others. Data is presented in both graphic and tabular form, an...

Catherine L. Fisk of the University of California, Irvine, has been awarded the AHA's Littleton-Griswold Prize for her book, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press). The prize is offered annually by the American Historical Association for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society. Professor Fisk was previously awarded the John Phillip Reid Book Prize of the American Society for Legal History.

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) will hold its 2012 meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 19-22, 2012, jointly with the National Council on Public History .  The theme of the meeting is "Frontiers of Capitalism and Democracy." As the call for proposals says, the OAH especially solicits panels that address the shaping role of evolving market systems, class relations, and migrations over the long chronological sweep of American history, or that explore the frontiers of social imagination and/or territorial encounters that have altered understandings of other peoples and traditions. While we invite sessions on all aspects of U.S. history, we are especially eager to see those that stimulate reflection on tensions and/or interchanges between capitalism and democracy at “frontier” moments in the past. The OAH requires that proposals be submitted through its online proposal system .  Please see the complete call for proposals for full guidelines. The deadline...

The 2010 edition of the Boletín de la Red de Estudios de Historia de Empresas (Bulletin of the Network for Business History Studies), edited by María Inés Barbera and Andrea Lluch of the Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina, has been published.  Its purpose is “to provide virtual information and become a discussion forum for researchers from several fields who are interested in business history. The Bulletin/Review contains two main sections—“Debates” and “Archives”—introducing new issues, topics, and sources for the study of business history. It also includes a section on bibliographical reviews and current information on seminars, lectures, publications, dissertations, and other field-specific materials.” The Bulletin is in Spanish, with an English summary attached. Previous issues are available on the AMHE (Asociación Mexicana de Historia Económica) site.

The Winton Centre for Financial History at Newnham College, Cambridge, is sponsoring a conference on "Ottoman-European Exchanges in Commerce, Finance, and Culture, c.1450-c.1914," to be held March 28-30, 2011. The program is now available on the conference website. As the conference organizers explain, Despite the resurgence of interest in Christian-Muslim relations in the last decade or so, historians have paid far less attention to the commercial exchanges between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The relative paucity of rigorous comparative historical studies, which place the fiscal and financial institutions within their respective political cultures, territorial realities, and societal frameworks, makes it difficult to judge how far the Ottoman experience differs significantly from that of their European neighbours, especially insofar as the Ottomans, with their cosmopolitan metropolis, and their Balkan, Anatolian, Near Eastern and North African holdi...

The 2010 edition of BEH On-Line , a series devoted to edited essays from the Business History Conference annual meetings, is complete.  Readers may freely access all of the 22 essays in this issue, as well as any of the 177 previous essays.  A cumulative author index is available. Each year's issue includes the program and paper abstracts from that year's meeting.  BEH On-Line is the successor publication of the BHC's Business and Economic History , print collections of papers from the annual meetings.  The complete run of Business and Economic History , 1962-1999, can be accessed from the BHC website, and includes a cumulative index as well.