The Exchange

The next annual conference of the Economic History Society will be hosted by the University of Wolverhampton, at its Telford campus, on March 27-29, 2015. The conference program committee invites proposals on all aspects of economic and social history covering a wide range of periods and countries, and particularly welcomes papers of an interdisciplinary nature. The committee invites proposals for individual papers, as well as for entire sessions, which will be of 1.5-2 hours duration. Proposals should be submitted online via the Economic History Society website . For full consideration, proposals must be received by September 5, 2014 . New Researcher Papers Each EHS conference opens with papers presented by new researchers. Those completing (or who have recently completed) doctorates have the opportunity to present their own work before professional colleagues and to benefit from informed comment. Preference will be given to proposals from speakers who have not participated in ...

As readers begin to think about proposals for the 2015 Business History Conference annual meeting , which will be a joint meeting with the European Business History Association and will be held June 24-27 in Miami, Florida, we call your attention to a new feature on the meeting site: a session organizer . The site provides a common locus where those who are seeking papers to complete potential panels can provide information. There is a form for sending in listings, which will then be posted on the website.    The theme of the meeting will be “Inequalities: Winners and Losers in Business.” For more meeting details, please see the call for papers . The deadline for proposals is October 15, 2014 .

The Centre for Port and Maritime History at the University of Liverpool hosts an annual interdisciplinary conference with a different theme each year. The 2014 conference, to be held September 11-12, will address the topic "Vectors: Port Cities as Gateways, Channels and Conduits." Day 2 (September 12) will now be a joint day co-chaired with the Envisioning Indian City Project (ETIC). The ETIC conference in full will be meeting at the University of Liverpool on September 12-13, with a focus on " Meeting Places: The City as a Space of Cross-Cultural Encounter."     To reflect the coordination with the ETIC meeting, the deadline for submissions to the "Vectors" conference has been extended to July 15, 2014. Abstracts (300 words) and contact information should be sent to Andrew Popp by the deadline.     For more information, please see the revised call for papers .

The June 2014 issue of Enterprise & Society is now available. Full access requires a subscription (included in BHC membership), but access to abstracts is unrestricted.  The issue contains: Marc Flandreau and Gabriel Geisler Mesevage , "The Untold History of Transparency: Mercantile Agencies, the Law, and the Lawyers (1851–1916) Eelke Michiel Heemskerk and Meindert Fennema , "Women on Board: Female Board Membership as a Form of Elite Democratization" Martin Eriksson , "Embedding Big Business: The Political Economy of the 1938 Corporate Tax Reform in Sweden" Luciano Segreto and Ben Wubs , "Resistance of the Defeated: German and Italian Big Business and the American Antitrust Policy, 1945–1957" Darren E. Grem , " Christianity Today , J. Howard Pew, and the Business of Conservative Evangelicalism" Also, just a reminder for those who may have missed previous announcements: the winning articles of the 2014 Oxford Journals Prize ( F...

Herewith a listing of recent and forthcoming books in business and economic history through August 2014: Piet Clement, Harold James, and Herman Van der Wee, eds., Financial Innovation, Regulation and Crises in History (Pickering &Chatto, July 2014) Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain (Oxford University Press May 2014) Michael Dennis, Blood on Steel: Chicago Steelworkers and the Strike of 1937 (Johns Hopkins University Press, August 2014) Robert E. Gallamore and John R. Meyer, American Railroads: Decline and Renaissance in the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, June 2014) H. Roger Grant, The Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston Rail Road: Dreams of Linking North and South (Indiana University Press, April 2014) Nancy H. Green, The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941 (University of Chicago Press, July 2014)  Martin Horn and Talbot Imlay, The Politic...

Having missed the last quarterly edition, we're dividing the recent book list into two parts; this first segment covers the period February-April 2014; the next, to be posted later this week, will include publications for May-August 2014. Sean Patrick Adams, Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, March 2014) Volker R. Berghahn, American Big Business in Britain and Germany: A Comparative History of Two "Special Relationships" in the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, April 2014) Ted Binnema, Enlightened Zeal: The Hudson's Bay Company and Scientific Networks, 1670-1870 (University of Toronto Press, April 2014) Catherine Cangany, Frontier Seaport: Detroit's Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt (University of Chicago Press, March 2014) Pierre-Yves Donzé, A Business History of the Swatch Group: The Rebirth of Swiss Watchmaking and the Globalization of the Luxury Industry (Macmillan, April 2014...

The Regulatory Oral History Hub at Duke University is now up and running.  The website, created by Edward Balleisen with the help of Elizabeth Brake and Will Goldsmith, is an online gateway to oral histories that illuminate various aspects of regulatory governance. Most commonly, this means interviews with regulators, the regulated, or political actors who were instrumental in creating or changing regulatory agencies or frameworks—usually lawyers, judges, and legislators, but also grassroots activists, industry lobbyists, and interested academics. . . . This project helps make relevant oral histories accessible to scholars, students, and policymakers in an effort to break open that regulatory black box. We are working to catalog and tag the most relevant oral history collections to sort through what interviews have been conducted and draw out the oral history work that remains to be done. The site offers various ways of searching for materials: by regulated industry or iss...

Jacob Weisdorf and Alfred Reckendrees, editors of the Scandinavian Economic History Review (SEHR), have announced the availability of a "virtual issue" on "Gender in Economic History." They have selected a number of articles published in SEHR over the last two decades to show how the discussion has developed over time and made the articles freely available on the SEHR website . The editors note,  [‘Gender’] seems widely underused and too narrowly used in economic history where the major focus is still on equal wages and participation of women in the labour market. Other aspects of ‘gender’, for example relating to entrepreneurial activity, to the business of sex, to ‘maleness’, to consumption or more generally to social life, which are heavily debated in cultural history and cultural studies, do not yet receive sufficient attention in economic and business history. They hope to encourage researchers to advance the field in new directions and to submit manus...

The Conference on Historical Analysis & Research in Marketing (CHARM) will hold its next meeting on May 28-31, 2015, on board the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. The theme of the meeting will be "Crossing Boundaries, Spanning Borders: Voyages around Marketing's Past." The meeting will be preceded by a Doctoral Workshop on Historical Methods in Marketing Scholarship. The call for papers states: "Both individual papers and entire panels on all aspects of marketing history, historic marketing, and the history of marketing thought in all geographic areas and all time frames are welcome. In accord with the Conference theme, we welcome papers that both examine the history of marketing as a discipline and also critically draw on marketing as a source in reconstructing the past." The submission deadline is December 14, 2014 . For a fuller description of the conference theme and directions for submission, please see the complete call for papers .

Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) has created a History of Capitalism Initiative , a coordinated program to examine this subject through a variety of projects. According to the Initiative website, the coordinators seek to understand the many dimensions of American capitalism, setting the stories of corporate titans and failed entrepreneurs, industrial workers and newly arrived immigrants, in a global framework that arcs from slave plantations to the transnational corporations of today. Our project is to draw together the disparate fields of history—including the study of work, labor, politics, culture, gender, race, environment, the state, and economics—into a rich discussion about the development of capitalism.     The program so far includes an annual conference, the history of capitalism "Summer Camp," and a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), "American Capitalism: A History," taught by Edward Baptist and Louis Hyman. G...

The Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Division of Yale University Library has produced a web exhibit, "America and the Utopian Dream," which readers might find of interest in conjunction with the previously posted New Harmony conference announcement . The site contains images and manuscript materials about a number of American utopian communities, as well as literary views of utopias (and a few dystopias). Examples range from Sir Thomas More's Utopia to "Star Trek's" humanistic view of space travel.