The Exchange

An interdisciplinary conference on "Immigration and Entrepreneurship" will be held in Fall 2012, cosponsored by the Center for the History of New America (University of Maryland), the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (University of Maryland), and the German Historical Institute (Washington, D.C.). Conveners are David B. Sicilia and David F. Barbe, University of Maryland, College Park, and Hartmut Berghoff, German Historical Institute and University of Göttingen. The call for papers states, in part: The United States has long been an immigrant society as well as an entrepreneurial society. This is no coincidence: immigrants launch new enterprises and invent new technologies at rates much higher than native-born Americans. As the volume of in-migration again approaches that of the “new immigration” at the turn of the twentieth century, it is time to measure how immigrants have shaped the American economy in the past and how immigration policy reform in 1965 has fost...

Given the important relationships between business and the state (see the theme for the 2012 Business History Conference meeting), business and economic historians are often interested in political data. For the United States, more and more of this information has been digitized and is freely available on-line.     In 2008 the University of Richmond launched "Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008." That site uses interactive maps and county election data to allow both narrow and broad analysis of presidential elections since 1840, and also of some congressional elections. The site was redesigned and relaunched in 2011, and the project managers continue to add data and refine the presentation. (Researchers can also find county-level data for U.S. presidential and congressional elections, 1840-1972, at the ICPSR site ).    At about the same time, "A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787-1825" appeared. Presented by the American Antiqua...

The Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Rothschild Archive , London, will jointly sponsor the twelfth annual PEAES conference, “Foreign Confidence: International Investment in North America, 1700 to 1860,” to be held October 11-12, 2012, in Philadelphia. In addition to invited conference guests, proposals are solicited for papers on the conference theme, which is intended to encompass the varied ways that foreign networks of individuals and institutions provided funds and credit to North Americans for commerce, internal development, philanthropy, banking, and other forms of transnational investment. New research that highlights the great reach of capital and credit from Europe into North America and then out into many empires and world regions are especially welcome, as are proposals concerning, for example, the role of strategic international marriages, transnational secrecy and information sharing, the financial co...

The April 2011 issue of the American Historical Association's magazine, Perspectives , is now freely available to members and non-members alike. The issue contains a forum on "The Art of the Article," featuring several authors well-known to the Business History Conference: Aaron Marrs , Peter Coclanis , and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer , as well as Catherine E. Kelly , editor of Common-Place . Also of interest are an essay on Oliver Stone's Wall Street films by Joyce Appleby and one by Jonathan Rees updating his earlier article on teaching history with YouTube.    The AHA makes available the full contents of each issue of Perspectives one month after publication.

Women in Technological History (WITH) , a Special Interest Group of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), announces the availability of its travel awards for 2011. The purpose of the award is to encourage participation of “new voices” at the SHOT annual meeting. WITH invites applications from scholars presenting topics or perspectives underrepresented in SHOT as well as from individuals who can contribute to the annual meeting’s geographic and cultural diversity.    The SHOT 2011 meeting will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, November 3-6, 2011. This year the meeting will be co-located with the annual meetings of the History of Science Society and the Society for Social Studies of Science .    The WITH Travel Award is open to individuals who are giving a paper at the SHOT annual meeting. Priority for the WITH award will go to: 1) a scholar or graduate student new to SHOT belonging to a group underrepresented in SHOT, whose paper addresses issues of...

Followers of the BHC, which as an organization embraces scholars in both history and economics departments (as well as those in business schools, public policy venues, and many others), may find  interesting a post and follow-up discussion by David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, over at the Legal History Blog . In the original post, titled "How Historians Can Benefit from Economics," Bernstein wrote, . . . historians could benefit from economics in two ways. First, economists are very good at defining their terms, something that seems to me to be a weakness among many historians. . . . A lack of precision isn’t conducive to good history writing. Second, economics can help historians find interesting topics to research. Consider “company towns.” Standard histories assert that large mining and other companies exploited . . .  workers by forcing them to live in company housing and buy from company stores. But when an economist reads about compa...

 "I just want to say one word to you, just one word. . . . Are you listening? . . . Plastics.  . . . There's a great future in plastics. Think about it." Mr. Maquire to Benjamin Braddock, The Graduate (1967) The Special Collections Research Center at the Syracuse University Library has created an on-line exhibit featuring its plastics collection. The website "combines narratives about the people, materials, and corporations responsible for our cultural embrace of plastic with a searchable digital collection of original research materials from Syracuse University Library, including manuscripts, printed materials, photographs, and artifacts. . . . The Plastics Collection at the Syracuse University Library, founded in 2008, is the largest university-based resource on the history of plastics. The purpose of the Plastics Collection is to serve as a research and programming center to advance the study and understanding of plastics in modern society, including it...

The German Historical Institute jn Washington, DC (GHI) is seeking a full-time Project Associate for its collaborative research project, Immigrant Entrepreneurship . The multi-year project is aimed at fostering research into two cornerstones of the American experience, immigration and entrepreneurship. It will feature a published collection—in print and online—of ca. 250 biographical essays of first- and second-generation German-American business people. By synthesizing the diverse fields of business history, entrepreneurship research, migration history, and German-American studies, Immigrant Entrepreneurship will make a significant contribution to a wide array of academic disciplines and offer unique tools for research and teaching. Further information about the project can be found at www.ghi-dc.org/entrepreneurship . The Project Associate will seek contributors and commission essays for Volume I: "From the Colonial Economy to Early Industrialization (1720-1840)" and V...

Several items of interest from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC):    The Institute will hold its annual meeting June 17-19, 2011, at the State University of New York, New Paltz. The program and registration details are now available on-line. Presenters who also participated in the recent Business History Conference meeting include Kim Todt of Cornell University, who will discuss "The Migration of Dutch Women to New Netherland under Employment Contracts," and Joseph Adelman of Johns Hopkins University, who will speak on "Printers and the Representation of Public Opinion in the Revolutionary Media." Other topics of interest include the slave trade and mercantilism, pearls as an imperial commodity, New England-West Indies trade, Quaker poverty assistance, and piracy.     The Institute's call for papers for the 2012 meeting, which will be held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, on June 15–17, 2012, has...

A sampling of recently published and forthcoming books on topics of interest: Franco Amatori and Andrea Colli, Business History: Complexities and Comparisons (Routledge, forthcoming, May 2011) Donica Belisle, Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada (UBC Press, February 2011) Dan Breznitz and Michael Murphree, Run of the Red Queen: Government Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China (Yale University Press, April 2011). Alexander Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth (Yale University Press, April, 2011) Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors' Democracy (Harvard University Press, forthcoming, May 2011) Sara B. Pritchard, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Harvard University Press, February 2011) Emanuela Scarpellini, Material Nation: A Consumer's History of Modern Italy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, April 2011) Michae...

We mentioned here earlier that the Spring 2011 number of Enterprise & Society was a special issue offering new perspectives on "the military-industrial complex." The occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower's speech of January 17, 1961, in which he used the phrase, has occasioned a number of publications and commentaries. The speech itself is available as a video here and as a transcript here . The National Archives also has a video discussing the writing of the speech . The Eisenhower Institute held a commemorative event , which can be seen on video.    Two recent journalistic treatments of the subject have also recently appeared: William Hartung, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2010) and James Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Yale University Press, 2011). The books were jointly reviewed in the Wal...

FRESH: Frontier Research in Economic and Social History , is an international group based in the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen. As the organizers explain, "the meetings build on the concept that scholars present their ongoing research at an early stage, i.e. before it becomes published as a working paper or the like, and certainly before it is published in journals or books. The main aim of the meetings is to gather researchers in a friendly and non-imposing environment where they can present their research and receive constructive criticism from their peers." Researchers in any field of economic or social history are welcome to register as members; there is no charge. Upcoming meetings will be held in Gothenberg, Antwerp, Montevideo, and Münster. The program for the most recent meeting in Moscow is available on the FRESH website, as are programs from other previous meetings.

The use of Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS) technology has been increasing in recent years. Maps used in GIS systems must be geo-referenced—that is, common coordinates or other information must be embedded in images so that multiple datasets can be applied to the same space. The technology has been in use for many years among geographers, but has only recently come to the attention of historians. At the same time, software programs for creating and viewing geo-referenced materials have become more widespread. A number of websites are now available that illustrate some of the possibilities in relation to economic history topics: Beyond Steel: An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture Urban Transition Historical GIS Project Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City David Rumsay Map Collection GIS Examples Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915-1930 The Grub Street Project: Topographies of Eighteenth...

The British Group in Early American History has issued a call for papers for its 2011 meeting, which will be held September 9-11, 2011, at the University of Kent at Canterbury. The theme of the conference is " 'The Growing Daughter': Economies and Cultures in the Development of Early America, 1600-1820." The call for papers states: The conference organisers welcome proposals for individual papers; for complete panels (of typically three speakers), or for roundtables and other emerging conference formats. . . . The themes of this year’s conference—Economies and Cultures in the Development of Early America—will offer delegates the opportunity to think afresh about the development (broadly defined and interpreted) of the British American colonies. In particular, it is hoped that discussions will re-visit the economic history of the colonies and will test the possibilities of blending economic analysis with the study of political institutions and cultures in assisting o...

As reported earlier , the Business History Review is now being distributed by Cambridge University Press. In the first issue of the new partnership, the Spring 2011 number, the editors ( Walter Friedman and Geoffrey Jones ) have taken the opportunity "to consider the work published by business historians over the past ten years, and to think about the future direction of the journal as well as of the field more broadly." The full essay, "Business History: Time for Debate," is available on  the BHR 's HBS website.    Readers may also be particularly interested in the Winter 2010 volume , which is a special issue on "Business History and the Varieties of Capitalism." The issue features a Roundtable by V. R. Berghahn, Gary Herrigel, Martin Jes Iversen, Cathie Jo Martin, Rory M. Miller, Kathleen Thelen, Richard Whitley, Mira Wilkins, and Jonathan Zeitlin, which is available on-line. The BHR routinely makes one or two of the articles and book revi...

From April 1 to July 31, 2011, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be hosting an exhibition entitled  "Health for Sale: Posters from the William H. Helfand Collection." Several of the images are available for viewing on-line at the PMA website. This exhibition presents some fifty of the nearly two hundred posters in this collection, only a small fraction of the materials Helfand, a former Merck executive, has collected. The posters address a wide range of topics, such as promoting hygiene, announcing medical conferences, and advertising miracle cures. An extended interview with Helfand can be found at the Design Observer , which also includes selected images. An exhibition catalog has been published by Yale University Press.    Other useful sources for medical images, not limited to posters, include the Wellcome Library in London and the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. Such materials are of interest to business historians because details of the...