The Exchange

Around the web: Stephen Mihm of the University of Georgia has an article in the Boston Globe that delves into the links between slavery and present-day inequality. Over on "The Junto," Lindsay Schakenbach, Ph.D. candidate in history at Brown University, has a guest post about the founding of Lowell and the federal executive.  Internet Archive Book Images places online over two million public domain images from digitized books with full bibliographic details and surrounding text. Search, for example, for "telegraph" (making sure to select the Book Images database only). An article about the project can be found here . Note also that the British Library has a similar photostream , though its site does not include accompanying text. The Guardian has published a series of interesting maps of eighteenth-century shipping trade routes by James Cheshire. In the same article, see the maps put in motion by Ben Schmidt. For more examples of GIS, see Cheshire...

Copenhagen Business School will be offering a Ph.D. Seminar on “Using Historical Approaches in Management and Organizational Research” this fall on November 17-18, 2014. Faculty will consist of Per H. Hansen, Professor of Business History Tor Hernes, Professor of Organization Christina Lubinski, Associate Prof of Business History Mads Mordhorst, Associate Prof of Business History Majken Schultz, Professor of Organization Roy Suddaby, Editor, Academy of Management Review R. Daniel Wadhwani, Associate Prof of Entrepreneurship Each participant must submit a working paper or full-length proposal for group discussion or review by November 17. Candidates must apply no later than October 17, 2014 . The seminar will provide a broad overview of the uses of history in management and organizational research, and then examine more closely three ways in which historical sources, methods, and perspectives can be used to address organizational research questions. As the organizers explain...

A call for papers has been issued for a conference on "Trafficking, Smuggling, and Illicit Migration in Historical Perspective." The meeting will take place at Birkbeck College, University of London, on June 18-20, 2015. In the words of the organizers: Human trafficking, human smuggling, and illicit migration are some of the most politically volatile and pressing issues in the present day. They are also the subject of a growing amount of sociological, criminological, and historical research. This combined conference and workshop aims to bring together the growing number of scholars who are currently working on the histories of trafficking, smuggling, and illicit and sexual migration from all regions in the modern period. In particular, it aims to critically engage with the concept of sexual trafficking in the past by exploring the way in which it was entangled with labour and with migration more broadly. Papers need not be limited, therefore, to the subject of traffickin...

Business History Explorer (BHE) is a bibliography covering the history of UK businesses and the industries to which they belong. Its prime purpose is to assist researchers in locating historical information about specific businesses. Information for the bibliography was gathered between 2006 and 2012 by John Orbell with the help of Richard Storey. At the core of the bibliography are the 4,000 entries in Francis Goodall’s Bibliography of British Business Histories (1987), to which the present compilers have added over 20,000 entries. First published in late 2012, the BHE listings are continuously updated. The project is supported by the British Archives Council .      BHE’s content includes monographs, chapters within monographs, theses, and unpublished manuscripts. It presently excludes periodical articles, but a selected number will be included in subsequent editions.       Simple search lists are compiled without a fee, but access t...

Contents of the September 2014 issue of Enterprise & Society have now been posted on the Oxford Journals website. Articles include Paul Anthony Cluster "The M Yarn: Price and Social Imagination in Early Industrial Britain" Paula A. De La Cruz-Fernández "Marketing the Hearth: Ornamental Embroidery and the Building of the Multinational Singer Sewing Machine Company" James Reveley and John Singleton "Clearing the Cupboard: The Role of Public Relations in London Clearing Banks’ Collective Legitimacy-Seeking, 1950–1980" Nikki Mandell "Will the Real Businessman/Businesswoman Stand Up? The Historical Implications of Regendering Business Success in the Early Twentieth Century" Marcelo Bucheli and Erica Salvaj "Adaptation Strategies of Multinational Corporations, State-Owned Enterprises, and Domestic Business Groups to Economic and Political Transitions: A Network Analysis of the Chilean Telecommunications Sector, 1958–2005...

The Hagley Museum and Library and the Miller Center at the University of Virginia announce a Miller Center/Hagley Library Dissertation Fellowship in Business and Politics . The fellowship, which will commence with the 2015-2016 academic year, supports the completion of dissertations that address the connections between business and politics. The Miller Center/Hagley fellow is expected to be in residence at Hagley for the academic year. While in residence, the fellow will receive an office, stack access, interlibrary loan privileges, Internet access, the opportunity to present a paper in Hagley’s seminar series, and use of Hagley’s discounted scholar’s accommodations. Through the Miller Center, the fellow will be paired with a mentor, a senior scholar in the fellow’s field who will provide critical guidance during his/her fellowship year. The fellowship carries a stipend of $24,000.      Roger Horowitz, director of the Center for the History of Business, Techno...

The annual congress of the European Business History Association (EBHA) will take place this week (August 21-23) in Utrecht. The theme for the meeting is "Comparative Business History: Contrasting Regions, Sectors and Centuries." The final program is now available online, including abstracts of the papers and full texts of many of them. In addition to dozens of sessions, the program also includes a poster session, a dissertation session, and two plenaries--one a roundtable on "Business History--Debates, Theories, Methods" and another a keynote speech by Maarten Prak on "Comparing Centuries: Continuities and Transitions in the Dutch 'Poldermodel'."      For full meeting information, including a PDF of the congress brochure , please see the EBHA congress website .

Around the web: In the wake of events in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, Colin Gordon and his maps have become a feature of several recent news stories, particularly in The New York Times . The maps, showing the racial make-up of the area over time, are a supplement to Gordon's book, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). The map website is here . There will be a conference on "Corsairs and Pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean, 15 th –19 th c." in Athens, Greece, on October 17-19, 2014. The program is available here . Andrew Watson has a post on the NiCHE website (Network in Canadian History and Environment), discussing supply chains for leather in the nineteenth century, that makes good use of Historical GIS techniques. Deidre McCloskey engages in a printed discussion with Joel Mokyr and John Nye in "Deidre McCloskey and Economists' Ideas abou...

A great many websites have sprung up to mark the centennial of the outbreak of World War I. Of particular interest to business and economic historians are materials posted by the banking industry.     The Business Archives Council has provided one handy list of British banks' commemorative websites, providing links to the Baring Archives the Midlands Bank the Royal Bank of Scotland     Other banks that have set up commemorative sites include Lloyds Banking Group , the Bank of England , and Barclays . In the United States, the Federal Reserve has posted an essay on "The Federal Reserve's Role during World War I."

Created in 1981, the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program is a speakers bureau dedicated to American history. According to the Organization of American Historians website, "OAH Distinguished Lecturers speak around the country every year, not only visiting college campuses and addressing undergraduate and graduate student conferences but also leading teacher seminars and engaging general audiences at public events sponsored by historical societies, museums, libraries, and humanities councils." Among the many topics covered by the series is "The History of Capitalism," which encompasses over 30 speakers on various facets of the subject. Participating scholars include Sven Beckert, Peter Coclanis, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, Louis Hyman, Bethany Moreton, Julia Ott, Kim Phillips-Fein, Scott Sandage, and Jennifer Scanlon, to name only a few. Most speakers offer a selection of lectures.     OAH Distinguished Lecturers are appointed by the OAH president-elect. Each ...

With thanks to Andrew Smith, over at "The Past Speaks," a rundown of business history sessions at the recent Academy of Management meeting and the upcoming British Academy of Management conference : Academy of Management [links are to session abstracts] Program Session 142 Historical Approaches to Management and Organization Studies: Sources and MethodsHistory & Organization Studies Coordinator: R. Daniel Wadhwani; University of the Pacific Facilitator: Marcelo Bucheli; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Speakers: JoAnne Yates; MIT Sloan; Steven Kahl; Dartmouth College; David A. Kirsch; University of Maryland; Michael Rowlinson; Queen Mary University of London Program Session 225 New Tools for Old Data: Data Visualization Organizer: James M Wilson, University of Glasgow Program Session 855 Economics Lessons from History Chair: John Norman Davis; Hardin Simmons University “ 'Results of the Decade’ and Bond Rating Stability During the U.S. Great Depr...

The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will hold its next annual meeting in Dearborn, Michigan, on November 6-9, 2014. Registration is now open, and the preliminary program has been posted. In addition to many sessions of interest and several roundtables, the program will feature two plenary sessions. David Nye will speak at the opening plenary; a second session, organized by Bruce Seely and chaired by Rosalind Williams, will honor the late Thomas P. Hughes .     For additional information, please consult the SHOT meeting website .

The Social Science and Policy Forum (SSPF) at the University of Pennsylvania is holding a one-day conference on September 19, 2014, to discuss "The War on Poverty at 50: Its History and Legacy." The meeting will commence with a roundtable discussion of Michael Katz's The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation with Poverty (1990), which was reissued in a second, updated edition last year.  The full program is available now on the SSPF website. Please check there for additional information about the schedule and location.     The conference kicks off the SSPF's theme for 2014-2015, "Poverty and Opportunity."

The Centre for Economic and Business History and the Institute for the Study of Slavery at the University of Nottingham are holding an interdisciplinary conference on "The Business of Slavery," to take place September 17-19, 2014, at Nottingham.  According to the conference organizers, The event aims to bring together assessments of the contributions of enslaved people to the economy of different eras and societies and from various perspectives, including the wider economy, the slave traders, the slave holders and the slaves themselves. It will compare these assessments over chronological eras and in societies around the globe, and from a wide variety of disciplines.     The draft program for the meeting has now been posted. Registration is also open, and must be completed by August 15, 2014 . For additional information, please consult the conference website .     Questions should be addressed to Sheryllynne Haggerty , director of the Centre...

In the tradition of over-the-counter stocks (those traded in a context other than a formal exchange, often because they trade at too low a price ["penny stocks"]), these occasional lists will point to news notes of interest: Kathy Peiss of the University of Pennsylvania talks about the meanings attached to the zoot suit in the "Fashion Riot" segment about American apparel on BackStory    The Harvard University Press blog features an article entitled "Smuggling, Rebellion, and the Origins of Global Capitalism" by Michael Kwass, author of Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (HUP, April 2014). To commemorate the founding of the US Postal Service (July 26, 1775), Harvard libraries posted an example of postal currency from 1862. The summer 2014 issue of the AHA's Perspectives on History , in a section devoted to the Hobby Lobby decision, contains an essay by Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale University) and Ruth Bloch (UCLA):...

The exhibit "Show Me The Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present" has opened at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland, UK. The exhibit charts how the financial world has been imagined in art, illustration, photography and other visual media over the last three centuries in Britain and the United States. The exhibition shows how artists have grappled with the increasingly intangible nature of money and finance from the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century to the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. . . . As well as works in an array of media, the exhibition also reveals the development of an array of financial visualisations, including stock tickers and charts, newspaper illustrations, bank adverts and electronic trading systems.     This is primarily a physical exhibit, but the accompanying website has many images and a good deal of explanatory text. The exhibit will travel to other venues in the UK; please see th...