The Exchange

The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing invites submissions for a special issue focused on “Italian Marketing History,” to be guest edited by Jonathan Morris. The call for papers states: Several overarching themes are planned including historical studies of marketing within Italy and the ways in which Italy has been marketed beyond the country’s borders, the emergence of new distribution channels, the adaptation of marketing strategies imported from abroad, the ‘economic miracle’ of the late 1950s and subsequent affluence of the 1960s, the development of new consumer identities amongst women and youth, elite and mass tourism, and  the centuries-long marketing history of the Italian luxury industries such as fashion, furniture, and food. Please see the full call for papers for additional details. The deadline for submissions is August 1, 2013 .

The October 2011 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era devotes itself to booms and busts in the Gilded Age, particularly the Panic of 1873, which the editor characterizes as perhaps "the least understood major episode in the history of American political economy." For a brief period, all the articles are freely available from the journal's website. Contents include: Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Introduction: Reflecting on History when Markets Tumble" Nicolas Barreyre, "The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics" Scott Reynolds Nelson, "A Financial Crisis in Prints and Cartoons" Jonathan Levy, "The Freaks of Fortune: Moral Responsibility for Booms and Busts in Nineteenth-Century America" Scott Reynolds Nelson, "A Storm of Cheap Goods: New American Commodities and the Panic of 1873" Andrew Zimmerman, "Cotton Booms, Co...

The annual Cliometric Society conference in 2012 will be held on the weekend of Friday, May 18 through Sunday, May 20 at Westward Look, Tucson, Arizona, and hosted by the University of Arizona and the National Science Foundation.    The conference is designed to provide extensive discussion of new and innovative research in economic history. The papers selected for presentation and discussion are sent out to all conference participants in advance. All participants are required to read all papers and to attend the entire conference. At least one author must be a member of the Cliometric Society. For membership information contact Michael Haupert .    The deadline to submit a paper proposal or a request to attend the conference is January 18,  2012 . Interdisciplinary proposals and participants are strongly encouraged. Those wishing to present a paper should provide an abstract and a 3-5 page summary of the proposed paper. In choosing papers and participants,...

A few weeks ago, we mentioned the Echoes blog at Bloomberg.com, which Stephen Mihm of the University of Georgia has retooled to "unearth parallels between past and present, highlighting how the economic crises of our own era are perhaps not as unique as we think." Since its revamping, the blog has published numerous essays by members of the business history community, including: Sean Vanatta , "How the Insurance Industry Tried to Ban Christmas" Leslie Berlin , "When Steve Jobs Was a 'Joker' " Louis Hyman , "How Did World War II End the Great Depression?" Terri Lonier , "The Accident That Started the Breakfast Cereal Business" Jeffrey Fear , "The Long Shadow of German Hyperinflation Roger Horowitz , "Commemorating the Ford Edsel's Historically Bad Launch Among many other contributors familiar to business historians are Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Peter Coclanis, Steve Fraser, Marc Levinson, and Robert E. Wright...

The Centre for Business History at Copenhagen Business School is hosting a workshop on January 12-13, 2012, on "The Invention of Choice: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on Markets, Democracy, and Power." As organizer Stefan Schwarzkopf explains, The aim of the workshop is to problematize the notion of “choice” from various historical and theoretical perspectives. Rather than asking whether or not more (or less) choice per se is either good or bad for citizens and consumers—a perspective that dominates much of the discussion in marketing, consumer psychology, behavioural economics etc.—we want to use this workshop to exchange ideas about the historical, cultural and political circumstances that led to the reification of choice as a social policy aim in its own right.    The full program is available here .    Registration is via email to Stefan Schwarzkopf ; the deadline is January 6, 2012 .

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton University Press, 2011), by Louis Hyman , has been listed as one of Choice's top 25 academic books of the year. Readers can find on-line reviews of the book here and here . Hyman discusses the book in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review and can be heard discussing it with Marshall Poe at "New Books in History." He also contributed a comment to the Page 99 Test . Hyman is currently an assistant professor in the Labor Relations, Law, and History department at the ILR school of Cornell University. In 2008, he won the Business History Conference's Herman Krooss Prize for the best dissertation presented at the BHC annual meeting; his thesis was entitled "Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America."

The International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society will hold its next biennial conference at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, on July 2-5, 2012. The theme of the meeting will be "Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Competitive Processes in Complex Economic Systems." According to the call for papers: Although the Conference is open to submissions in all areas of evolutionary economics, the Scientific Committee would like to encourage submissions in six priority areas: Evolutionary perspectives on the causes and consequences of high economic growth in Asian economies The role of energy and other natural resources in economic evolution Understanding and achieving environmental sustainability using evolutionary economic analysis The role of intellectual property in driving innovation in the new media Long waves, finance and global crises Productivity growth and structural change All paper proposals and abstracts must be submitted on-line thro...

The Z. Taylor Vinson Collection at the Hagley Library is one of the largest public collections of automotive trade catalogs and ephemera in the world. The collection covers the history of transportation with a primary focus on the automobile industry from 1891 to the present. The physical collection numbers approximately 67,000 items (700 cubic feet). The collection is currently being processed and will not open for research until 2014. In the meantime, Hagley has created this digital collection to serve as a preview. Interested researchers can also learn about updates to the collection at the Hagley's blog related to the Vinson Collection, which features short articles and full-text examples of items so far digitized.

Marshall Plan poster, 1950 The German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, D.C., with funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, has launched a new website on the topic TransatlanticPerspectives: Europe in the Eyes of European Immigrants to the United States,1930-1980 . The website is an outlet for a four-year research project that explores the role of European migrants in transatlantic exchange processes during the mid-twentieth century. The project focuses on migrant professionals involved in business, consumer culture, urban development, and the social sciences. By adapting their European professional heritage to their work in the United States and by translating American innovations to the context of their European homelands, these migrants acted as conduits for social and intellectual transfer. In addition to biographical information about individual migrants and their transatlantic careers, the site provides links to mass media articles th...

The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) Historical Society has just posted a new on-line gallery, "Chasing the Devil around the Stump: The SEC and the Courts," curated by Kurt Hohenstein of Winona State University. As the exhibit introduction explains, After the stock market crash of 1929, as the regulation of securities became more complex with the passage of the Securities Acts of the New Deal, the newly-established U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began to interpret the laws, create and implement rules, and develop legal strategies to regulate the securities industry. . . . The story of the development of securities law necessarily involves the written decisions of the courts, but to focus on merely those decisions . . . ignores much of the story. The context of the case and the decision, the manner by which a case came to be heard by a court, the strategic decisions made by the SEC General Counsel’s Office and appellate legal counsel, the personality o...

Over at Publick Occurrences , the Common-Place blog, Joseph M. Adelman has written the first two in what he promises will be a series of posts on the history and current problems of the U.S. Postal Service. The first comments on “The Decline and Fall of the U.S. Postal Service,” and the second considers “The Post Office as a State-Business Hybrid.”    Adelman (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 2010) is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, where he is working on a book project tentatively titled “Revolutionary Networks: The Business of Printing and the Production of American Politics, 1763-1789,” a systematic study of the communications infrastructure that framed political debate during the American Revolution. From February to July 2012, he will be an NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society .   His article, “‘A Constitutional Conveyance of Intelligence, Public and Priva...

Registration and accommodations booking are now open for the World Economic History Congress (WEHC), to be held in Stellenbosch, South Africa, on July 9-13, 2012. The main WEHC page has links to everything one might want to know, including travel, cultural and tourist information, and various deadlines and schedules. In addition, the list of accepted sessions has been posted, as well as links to calls for papers issued by session convenors.    There is also still time for Ph.D. students and junior postdoctoral researchers who would like to participate in the poster session to submit their abstracts—the deadline is March 1, 2012 . Full information about the submission procedures for poster presenters is available on the "Call for Posters" section of the WEHC site.

The International Maritime Economic History Association will hold its sixth conference in Ghent, Belgium, on July 2-6, 2012, at Het Pand, a historic dominican monastery. The emphasis will be on the international, transnational, and global character of maritime history, with special attention to the relation between maritime and global history. The preliminary program has now been posted. The keynote speaker will be Patrick Manning of the University of Pittsburgh. The program ranges widely over all aspects of maritime economic history, but business historians may find the following sessions of particular interest: "Nordic Shipping after 1960" (4) "French Shipping and Trade before the Revolution" (8) "Nordic Shipping from a Long-Term Perspective" (12) "Transnational Trade Networks around the Globe, 1600-1815" (15) "Maritime (In)security: Manuals, Insurances and Shipwrecks" (32) "Commercial and Political Dimensions of Shi...