The Exchange

The University of Illinois Foundation announces the opening of the 2015-2016 John Rovensky Fellowships application process. Two $8,000 fellowships will be awarded for doctoral students writing their dissertations in U.S. business or economic history. The fellowships are available largely through the generosity of the late John E. Rovensky and are administered by the University of Illinois Foundation. Awardees may use the fellowship concurrently with other funding sources, including grants or teaching assignments. Eligibility Applicants must be working toward a Ph.D. degree with U.S. business or economic history as the area of major interest. Fellowship recipients must be enrolled in a doctoral program at an accredited college or university in the United States. Preference will be given to applicants who are preparing for a career in teaching and research and who will have completed all graduate course work prior to the fall of 2015. Awards are non-renewable, but may be taken al...

This week's collection of notes of interest from around the Web: Web resource for Depression studies: "American Life Histories : Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940" at the Library of Congress; the site contains "the life stories of more than 10,000 men and women from a variety of regions, occupations and ethnic groups. People who told stories of life and work during the 1930s include an Irish maid from Massachusetts, a woman who worked in a North Carolina textile mill, a Scandinavian iron worker, a Vermont farm wife, an African-American worker in Chicago meat packing house, and a clerk in Macy's department store." "Tracing Capitalism around the Globe" is a Cambridge University Press blog interview with Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson, coeditors of CUP's Cambridge History of Capitalism . More on Thomas Piketty:    a weekly series of substantive posts by Adam David Morton    "Piketty Envy" from Th...

The 2015 EABH (European Association for Banking and Financial History) has issued a call for papers for its next archival workshop, to be held on May 14, 2015, in Prague, Czech Republic. The workshop, hosted by the Czech National Bank and in cooperation with the Czech Banking Association, will focus on "Inflation. Money. Output: Economic and Financial Data Underpinning Analysis and Policy-Making." As the call for papers explains, Reliable and timely economic and financial statistics are of paramount importance today. . . . central banks, commercial banks and insurance companies have been systematically collecting and compiling economic and financial data since at least the 1920s, if not earlier, in support of macro-economic analysis and policy-making. No doubt, many of these institutions will have in their archives data collections pre-dating automation . . . . The purpose of this workshop is to gain a better understanding of what is actually available in financial ins...

As the new academic year begins, we again offer a round-up of ongoing workshops, forums, and discussion groups in business and economic history. Please check each website for more detailed information. Some groups, particularly those in non-US universities, may not yet have posted Fall 2014 information; in those cases, a link to the home site or last available listing is included.      In addition to their value for those able to participate directly, these groups often maintain mailing lists and sometimes make speakers' papers freely available. Business History Seminar , Harvard Business School (scroll down) Business History Unit Seminars, LSE Business History @ Erasmus Seminars Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society (Hagley) Research Seminars Centre for Macroeconomics and the Historical Record (MEHR), University of Copenhagen Columbia University Seminar in Economic History Seminars in Economic and Social History , University ...

A conference on "The History of Law and Business Organization" will be held at the Harvard Business School on November 21-22, 2014. The meeting is sponsored jointly by the Business History Initiative , the Economic History Seminar at Harvard University, and the Program in Economic History at the Economic Growth Center, Yale University. According to the conference statement: It brings together leading scholars to advance the study of the intersection of law and business organization. The conference explores the consequences of underlying legal structures for business and economic development. The key topics for discussion will revolve around the type of legal form that is most conducive to economic development (i.e., the corporation versus alternative forms like the partnership or intermediate forms like the private limited liability structure). The conference papers will consider the significance of the Anglo-American common-law tradition versus code-based legal systems....

As part of the 80 th  anniversary celebrations of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Chile, the Faculty is hosting an International Conference on the Economic and Business History of Latin America to be held on December 12, 2014 in its premises in Santiago, Chile. The conference invites contributions in English or Spanish in all areas associated to the themes of the conference. A selection of the participating papers will be invited to be published in a special issue of the journal  Estudios de Economía with Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo (Bangor University) as guest editor. The conference is organized with the sponsorship of Universidad de Santiago de Chile.     The conference is also organizing a posters session open to undergraduate and postgraduate students undertaking their thesis in any field relevant to the conference. The best posters will be awarded a prize. The deadline for submitting contributions and posters is Octobe...

The preliminary program for the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH), to be held on November 6-9, 2014 in Denver, Colorado, has been posted.  Papers of interest include Justene G. Hill, Princeton University, “'A Monstrous Nuisance': Legislative Responses to Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1850-1860” (Friday, A2) Tamara Venit-Shelton, Claremont McKenna College, “Too Big to Fail? Stephen Mallory White, the Southern Pacific, and the Transformation of Anti-Monopolist Politics in California and the Nation” (Friday, B2) Megan Francis, University of Washington, “Black Convict Labor, Capitalism, and the Rise of the New South” (Saturday, D4) and entire sessions such as “Law's Governance and Labor's Bodies” (Friday, B3) “ 'The Crime Against the Economy': Revolutions, Markets and the Law” (Friday, C2) “Building a Public Economy: New Approaches to Progressive-Era Economic Regulation” (Saturday, B4) Those interested in attend...

A conference on "Green Capitalism? At the Crossroads of Environmental and Business History" will take place at the Hagley Museum and Library on October 30-31, 2014. The program has now been posted. Cosponsored by the Hagley's Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society and the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., the conference will feature a wrap-up summation by Christine Meisner Rosen of the University of California at Berkeley. Session topics include "Firms as Conservationists?", "Consumers' Demands," "Globalization," "Firms Going Green," and "Governance."      The meeting is open to all without fee, but advance registration is required. Those interested should contact Carol Lockman, clockman@Hagley.org , for program and registration information.

The 2015-2016 fellowship competition at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard (CWC) will focus on "The History of American Capitalism." According to the announcement: We propose to build on the growing scholarly interest in political economy and the history of capitalism while at once broadening its scope and creating a cross-disciplinary endeavor that embraces the sociology of knowledge, the study of technology and material culture, changing paradigms of political authority, the re-organization of family life, the invention of the modern private subject, and the birth of liberal ideology. We shall accordingly seek to include in the ranks of our fellows and guest lecturers scholars from such diverse fields as anthropology, business, engineering, law, political philosophy, and, yes, economics. Fellows will present their work in a seminar led by Sven Beckert (History), Christine Desan (Law School), and Michael Zakim (University...

Items of interest from around the Web: From the Museum of the City of New York : a new exhibition featuring the work of advertising illustrator Mac Connor (physical exhibit, but many on-line examples) From the New-York Historical Society blog: a post on "When Edison Lit Up Manhattan" As part of the British Library's "Endangered Archives" project, a large group of digitized documents from nineteenth-century Sierra Leone have been posted; many of the items concern "liberated Africans"--Africans freed from slave ships by the British Royal Navy The program is available for "All at Sea: An International Conference on Prize Papers" to be held in early October at the UK National Archives; more information about the prize papers (intercepted mail and legal documents found on captured ships and now part of British High Court of Admiralty records) can be found here .   The Atlantic has an interview with Kara Swanson about her new book,...

On September 4, 2014, The Economist published a short review of Edward Baptist's newly released book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014). The unsigned review concluded that "Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy."      The review in general and this comment in particular generated a firestorm of criticism from academics (including numerous sarcastic tweets; Twitter users may check #EconomistBookReviews ). The publisher quickly withdrew the piece, though it is still viewable here (minus the still photo originally included of Patsey from the movie "12 Years a Slave," with the caption "Patsey was certainly a valuable property;" that can be viewed here ).      Beyond the furor, the episode generated interesting discussions of the historiography of s...

The Business History Conference, through the work of its Liaison Committee, is sponsoring two sessions at the upcoming meeting of the Urban History Association (UHA), to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 9-12, 2014. Writing for the committee, Alexia Yates stated, “Many of our members are also affiliated with the UHA, and we enjoy several areas of shared research interest. We hope this collaboration helps further engage members of both associations.”  The two panels are: Friday, October 10th, 8:30-10a.m. Session 8: Food, Consumption, and Urban Placemaking Andrew Case, Michigan State University “Consuming the Countryside: The Rodale Press and the Tastes of Pennsylvania Dutch Country” Meredith TenHoor, Pratt Institute “Food and Gentrification in New York and Paris, circa 1970” Stephen Nepa, Temple University “Solving the ‘Rapid Transit Luncheon Problem’: The Horn and Hardart Company and the Automation of Dining Out in Philadelphia” Dylan Gottlieb, Princeto...

The History Project , in cooperation with the History Department at Yale University and the Joint Center for History and Economics , will hold its third conference on October 17-18, 2014, at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. The topic is "Institutions, Credit, and the State." The program has not yet been published, but a list of participants and paper abstracts are available on the conference website . Questions may be addressed to Jennifer Nickerson, coordinator of the History Project, at histproj@fas.harvard.edu . [Apologies for previously incorrect title!]     Readers may also want to check on the next annual conference in this series, which will focus on "The History of Energy and the Environment" and will be held at Harvard University on October 22-23, 2015.

During the Great Depression, the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) hired photographers to travel across America to document the toll taken by the economic collapse and the effect of government relief efforts. Between 1935 and 1945, well-known photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans took part in this massive photography project. The resulting photographs, over 170,000, were catalogued and eventually housed in the Library of Congress. Several years ago, the LoC digitized the images, but the sheer volume has made searching through them difficult.     Now the Yale University Public Humanities program, working with a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, has launched Photogrammar , a web-based platform that assists in organizing, searching, and visualizing the historic photographs. The Photogrammar platform allows one to search through the images by photographer and, via great interactive county-level maps , by pla...

The Asian Association of World Historians (AAWH) invites proposals for panels and papers at its Third Congress to be held May 29-31, 2015, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The theme of the Congress is “Migration in Global History: Peoples, Plants, Plagues, and Ports.” The call for papers states: Understood in the broadest sense, “migration” brings into focus questions about the movement of peoples, businesses, capital, ideas, goods, diseases, technologies, diverse forms of knowledge, artistic styles, ecologies, as well as medical and scientific discoveries and practices across global borders. . . . While the Congress committee welcomes panels and papers that address [the theme], it will also consider proposals related to other topics on the history of the Asia-Pacific from global and world perspectives, including (but not limited to) the interdisciplinary history of science, technology, medicine, business, and the environment. Proposals must be submitte...

As summer wanes and most readers settle in for the beginning of a new academic year, a reminder that paper proposals for the 2015 BHC-EBHA meeting are due by October 15 . The 2015 joint meeting of the Business History Conference and the European Business History Association will be held in Miami, Florida, on June 24-27. The theme of the meeting will be “Inequalities: Winners and Losers in Business.”  Thomas Piketty , author of Capital in the 21st Century , will deliver the joint meeting's plenary address. The conference also will have several additional plenary sessions, receptions, and organized local activities in Miami; addresses by the BHC and EBHA presidents; lunch meetings for business historians in business schools and for women in business history; a meeting of the Alliance of Centres for Business History in Europe; a breakfast and reception for emerging scholars (graduate students and recent Ph.D.s); membership meetings for the BHC and EBHA; and a closing banquet with ...