Preliminary AHA 2012 Program Now Available

The American Historical Association has released the preliminary version of the program for the 2012 annual meeting, which will be held in Chicago, Illinois, on January 5-8. As announced earlier, the Business History Conference is now an AHA-affiliated organization and as such can propose sessions for the meeting (though with no guarantee of acceptance). The BHC is sponsoring three sessions in Chicago, which can be found from the BHC sessions page. They include: session 95, "The Business of Media History: Technology, Journalism, Advertising," chaired by Pamela Walker Laird and featuring papers by Richard John, Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel, and James L. Baughman; session BHC2, "Writing History at The Wall Street Journal," chaired by Daniel Levinson-Wilk; and session 189, "Everyday Calculations: Varieties of Commercial Numeracy in Early America," chaired by Patricia Cline Cohen and including papers by Caitlin Rosenthal, Thomas Wickham, Molly McCarthy, and Jennifer Egloff.
   Other sessions of interest are the Economic History Association session and two German Historical Institute sessions, as well as several other papers. The EHA session, chaired by Daniel Raff, is "A Discussion of Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe by Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong." The GHI sessions are "Communities of Consumers? Social-Democratic Spaces in the Age of Postwar Mass Consumption," chaired by Lizabeth Cohen; the second is session 220, "In Search of a New Balance: Meat in Twentieth-Century America," which includes papers by Uwe Spiekermann on Oscar Mayer and by Roger Horowitz on Agriprocessor and the decline of kosher meat. An example of the single papers of interest is Rebecca Kobrin's paper in session 18: "Creative Destruction: Jewish Immigrant Bankers, the Business of Mass Migration, and the Reshaping of American Capitalism, 1870–1914."
   Abstracts are available for most sessions and papers. Additional papers of interest can be found by searching for relevant key words; the search engine captures not only words in session and paper titles but also those in the abstracts.