The Exchange

 Earlier this month, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) held a conference with the title, "Before Madison Avenue: Advertising in Early America." Now the Library Company of Philadelphia , in conjunction with the LCP's Visual Culture Program and the AAS's Center for Historic Visual Culture (CHAViC), has announced a similar meeting, also called "Before Madison Avenue: Advertising in Early America," to be held March 15-16, 2012. The conference program is now available. As the organizers explain: 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 that the growing nation offered. But what were the aesthetics, conventions, norms, and business practices of advertising in early America? How did individuals and businesses make sense of the constantly chan...

The Library Company of Philadelphia will host a conference on June 7-8, 2012, to investigate the topic “Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of Nineteenth-Century America.” As the call for papers explains:     There were many ways in which Americans earned a living through economic transactions beyond the spheres of “legitimate” commerce. Entrepreneurs of this sort included everyone from prostitutes and card sharps to confidence men, mock auctioneers, pickpockets, fences of stolen goods, and many others. Although these shadow economies may have unfolded “off the books,” they were anything but marginal. Instead, they were crucially important parts of the mainstream economy, bound up in the development of commercial and industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century America. The shadow economy’s successful entrepreneurs—women, people of color, and children among them—had to be even more creative, flexible, and adaptive than “respectable” counterparts. The practices,...

Readers in or near New York City will be interested in the Columbia University Business History Forum 's November 29 meeting, which will be a symposium on Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2011 [but out in January 2012]), edited by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith.    The symposium will meet from 6:30 to 8:00 pm, in Room 523, Butler Library, Columbia University, and will be followed by a reception. The meeting, which is open to the public, is sponsored by the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library; the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American  History; and the History Department at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.    Capitalism Takes Command presents original histories of the commercialization of farming, the creation of a national mortgage market, the collateralization of slaves, the invention of office systems, and more—an inventory of means by which capitalism became...

The Economic History Society has posted the preliminary program for its 2012 meeting, which will be held at St. Catherine's College at the University of Oxford on March 30-April 1, 2012. In addition to two sessions (IV.F and V.B) specifically labelled "business history," the program contains many topics of interest to both business and economic historians. The 2012 Tawney Lecture will be delivered by Professor Sir Roderick Floud of Gresham College.     Registration information and other details will be posted on the EHS conference site as they become available.

The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania present will host a conference on “Historicizing Routines” on November 1-2, 2012. The organizers “invite empirical and historically focused papers that explore the development, devolution, destruction, and re-creation of routines in twentieth-century organizations and bounded communities.” Herewith the complete call for papers:     Routines are central to much human behavior, both within organizations and more broadly, because they facilitate the navigation of complex social, economic, and ecological environments. Too often, however, they are simplistically equated with stasis and adaptation, and unfairly counter-posed to innovation or transformation. In reality, routines can be dynamic, as the organizations and individuals that follow them encounter and respond to new situations or condi...

The European Business History Association will hold its next meeting jointly with the Business History Society of Japan on August 30-September 1, 2012, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. The theme of the meeting is "Business Enterprises and the Tensions between Local and Global." Over several centuries companies have pursued their business strategies on several dimensions, from the local to the global. This can be seen in the recruitment of personnel, their procurement, their financing, their R & D, their production or services, and their relations with consumers, social forces, intellectuals, public authorities, education and research systems. However, the process of adapting to these multiple dimensions is not straightforward, even for large and experienced multinationals, and often results in tensions between global and local. . . . comparisons between regions and countries, branches of industry, single enterprises, and, of co...

Deadlines are approaching for the Lemelson Center Fellowship Program and Travel to Collections Award Program, which support projects that present creative approaches to the study of invention and innovation in American society.    The programs provide access to the expertise of the Institution's research staff and the vast invention and technology collections of the National Museum of American History (NMAH). The NMAH Archives Center documents both individuals and firms across a range of time periods and subject areas including railroads, musical instruments, television, radio, plastics, and sports equipment. Lemelson Center invites applications covering a broad spectrum of research topics that resonate with its mission to foster a greater understanding of invention and innovation, broadly defined. However, the Center especially encourages project proposals that will illuminate the role of women inventors; inventors with disabilities; inventors from diverse backgrounds...

The Oxford Journals Doctoral Colloquium in Business History offers a small group of graduate students an opportunity to work intensively on their dissertations with distinguished Business History Conference-affiliated scholars, including at least two BHC officers.     The 2012 Doctoral Colloquium will be held in conjunction with the Business History Conference annual meeting in Philadelphia. This prestigious workshop, sponsored by the BHC and generously funded by Oxford University Press, will take place Wednesday evening, March 28, 2012, and all day Thursday, March 29, 2012. The Colloquium is limited to ten students. Participants will discuss dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and employment opportunities in business history. The Colloquium is intended for doctoral candidates in early and mid-stages of their dissertation projects. To be considered for the Colloquium, applicants must provide: a statement of interest a CV a prel...

The Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society has posted a videocast of its recent program, "Silver Screen: How Films Shape Public Perception of Financial Regulation." Moderated by David Lipton of the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University of America, the program features a discussion of the topic by J. Bradley Bennett of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and John Reed Stark of Stroz Friedberg LLC (and formerly chief of the SEC's Office of Internet Enforcement). Particularly useful is the accompanying paper by Loren E. Miller , a Ph.D. candidate in history at American University; after a short introduction , she provides a 35-page listing of relevant movies from "The Good-for-Nothing" in 1914 to "Too Big to Fail" in 2011, with "Image of the Markets, Nature of the Misdeeds, and Role of Regulation in Film" for each entry.

The December 2011 issue of Enterprise & Society is now available on the Oxford University Press website. Full text access requires a subscription (included in BHC membership), but the abstracts or extracts are accessible by all.   Contents include papers from the Krooss Dissertation Session at the 2011 BHC meeting as well as the following articles: Sean Patrick Adams , "How Choice Fueled Panic: Philadelphians, Consumption, and the Panic of 1837" Christopher Jones , "The Carbon-Consuming Home: Residential Markets and Energy Transitions" Neveen Abdelrehim, Josephine Maltby , and Steven Toms , "Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Control: The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 1933–1951" Stuart W. Leslie , "The Strategy of Structure: Architectural and Managerial Style at Alcoa and Owens-Corning" The 2011 Presidential Address, normally included in this issue, will appear in the March 2012 number.

The German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, D.C., has issued a call for papers for a workshop to be held on February 24-25, 2012, on the topic “Globalization of African American Business and Consumer Culture.” Potential topics include, but are not limited to The marketing and selling of African-American culture (e.g. music, film, literature) around the globe African-American consumers and the global economy (e.g. import products) African-American businesses and businesspeople around the world Non-American cultural products (e.g. music, film, literature) and African-American consumers African-American international tourists and international tourists visiting African-American sites African-American consumers and immigrant businesses The international trade in the black freedom struggle's legacy (e.g. The Black Power Mixtape)    Please see the full call for papers for a complete description.    Proposals should include a paper title, a one-page ...

Stephen Mihm of the University of Georgia has revamped the Echoes blog at Bloomberg.com to focus on historical parallels to modern events in business and economics. As he explains: History doesn’t repeat itself. Sometimes, though, it rhymes. That idea animates our revamped "Echoes" blog, dedicated to the history of economics, business, finance and, above all, capitalism. Our contributors will aim to unearth parallels between past and present, highlighting how the economic crises of our own era are perhaps not as unique as we think. . . . Many of history's best economic stories can’t be reduced to numbers and charts. They're dramatic tales of hubris, innovation, brilliance and luck—of people caught in the grips of forces that they don't fully comprehend. We'll be trying to tell those stories here.    Commentary will be offered by business and economic historians, including co-contributors Philip Scranton of Rutgers University and John B. Taylor of Stanf...

The Market Cultures Group of New York City [no website] invites you to attend "Pioneering Economic Forecasters and Their Legacies," a presentation by Walter Friedman (research fellow, Harvard Business School, and editor, Business History Review ), in conversation with Anders Maxwell (managing director, Peter J. Solomon Company). The event will take place on Thursday, November 10, 6:00-7:30 p.m., at 80 Fifth Avenue, Room 529, The New School (New York City). For a copy of the paper, please contact Walter Friedman .    Next month the Market Cultures Group will host "The Legacy and Lessons of the Air Controllers' Strike," by Joseph McCartin (associate professor of history and director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and the author of the upcoming Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, The Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America ), in conversation with Ruth Milkman (professor of sociology, CUNY...

The History of Consumer Culture research group in Japan will be holding its next conference at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, on March 26-28, 2012. The meeting's theme is "Genealogies of Curiosity and Material Desire: How Has Consumer Taste Been Constructed?" The program , which includes links to abstracts of the papers, has now been posted. In addition to regular sessions, keynote addresses will be given by Toshio Kusamitsu, Professor in Humanities and Culture, Open University of Japan; John Styles, Research Professor in History, University of Hertfordshire; Avner Ofner, Chichele Professor of Economics History, All Souls College, Oxford; and John Brewer, Eli and Edye Broad Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology.     Additional conference details, including lodging and registration information, are available on the conference website .

The Grupo Cuatrinacional de Estudios Empresariales e Historia Económica and the Coloquio de Historia de Empresas will hold a joint business history symposium on November 10-11, 2011, at the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires. The program has now been posted. Sessions are organized around three themes: "Economic Fluctuations and Business Strategies in the Twentieth Century," "The Internationalization of Business," and "Agroindustries and Business." More information and registration materials are available on the conference website. Questions may be addressed to Andrea Lluch .      As part of the "Internationalization of Business" topic, there will be a presentation of the book El impacto histórico de la globalización en Argentina y Chile: empresas y empresarios , edited by Geoffrey Jones and Andrea Lluch (Buenos Aires, Temas, 2011). The book represents an early product of the "Latin American Business Initiative" of the Harv...

"Railroads and the Making of Modern America" is a digital history site at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, led by William G. Thomas III of Nebraska and Richard Healey, a geographer at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who focuses on historical GIS. The site's introduction explains: This project seeks to document and represent the rapid and far-reaching social effects of railroads and to explore the transformation of the United States to modern ideas, institutions, and practices in the nineteenth century. The railroad was the first and most complex national system in American history. The records of this system's colossal growth are as diverse as they are voluminous, ranging from massive and detailed corporate records to editorials, cartoons, poetry, songs, and even abandoned track lines in today's landscape. While many histories have addressed the railroad's importance, we need a new approach that takes account of how the railroad triggered unexpect...