The Exchange

The Living New Deal Project at the University of California, Berkeley, has released an interactive map that will eventually show every New Deal project in the United States and territories. One can focus in on an individual area, or even an individual project; the site supplies basic details for each item listed. One can also search by project type or a combination of place and type. The site offers illustrations of many artworks and construction projects completed under the auspices of New Deal agencies. According to the designers, "Our goal is to inventory and map all New Deal public works across the nation. We want to involve Americans in a collective rediscovery of what New Deal agencies did to extricate this country from the Great Depression and lay the foundation for postwar prosperity." The project is directed by Richard Walker, professor emeritus of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1975 to 2012.

The German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., offers a number of fellowships of direct interest to business historians. Doctoral Fellowship in International Business History Preference for this 6- to 12-month fellowship in International Business History will be given to applicants whose projects fit into the GHI's research foci on transatlantic relations and the history of consumption. Comparative work is also strongly encouraged. The monthly stipend is €1,700 for doctoral students from European institutions; students based at North American institutions will receive a stipend of $1,900. In addition, fellowship recipients based in Europe will receive reimbursement for their round-trip airfare to the United States. Fellowship in Economic and Social History   Preference for this fellowship is given to applicants on the postdoctoral level. Candidates doing original research for a second book project will be preferred. The monthly stipend is €3,000 for EU citizens and $3,20...

Those unable to attend the recent anniversary conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES), "Economic History's Many Muses," can find most of the papers freely available for download on the conference website. Presenters included Joseph Adelman, Caitlin Rosenthal, Stephen Mihm, Seth Rockman, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, Michelle Craig McDonald, and Dael Norwood; the full program is posted here .

Karen Cox's "Pop South" has a post on the history of the Aunt Jemima advertising campai gn and a discussion of the women on whom the ad campaign was based. Slate has an article on the world's oldest businesses and why so many of them are in Japan. At the "History of Economics Playground," Beatrice Cherrier has an interesting post on the development of the JEL code s. Congratulations to Bernardo Batiz-Lazo of Bangor Business School, whose co-authored (with Tobias Karlsson and Björn Thodenius) paper, "“The Origins of the Cashless Society: Cash Dispensers, Direct-to-Account Payments and the Development of On-Line Real Time Networks, C. 1965-1985,” was a co-winner of the Soltow Award for the best paper published in Essays in Business and Economic History , the journal of the Economic and Business History Society. The paper is freely available here . A research group founded at the University of Portsmouth, "Port Towns and Urban Cultur...

The Hispanic Liverpool Project , based at the University of Warwick, investigates the city's role as a hub in the networks of trade, commerce, migration, travel, tourism, politics, and culture that connected the Anglophone and the Luso-Hispanic worlds during the long nineteenth century. The project seeks to gather, record, and interpret the stories of the people who inhabited those networks, the trading connections they forged and exploited, the places they lived, worked, and are remembered, and the traces one can still find of them today, in Liverpool and elsewhere. According to project coordinator Kirsty Hooper , The Hispanic Liverpool Project works with a range of sources, including shipping records, trade directories, census returns, church records, newspaper articles, travel guides, memoirs and company archives. It combines a macrohistorical approach, which aims to understand Liverpool's place in the grand narratives of nineteenth-century Anglophone and Luso-Hispan...

The German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, has issued a call for papers for “Financialization: A New Chapter in the History of Capitalism?” to be held at the GHI on June 12-13, 2015. The conveners of this workshop are Hartmut Berghoff (Washington, DC), Kenneth Lipartito (Miami), and Laura Rischbieter (Berlin). The call for papers states: The term “financialization” is understood by most authors to refer to the shift since 1970 from industrial to finance capitalism, a shift that had profound social and political repercussions. Over the past few decades traditional industrial economies became dominated by financial capitalism. Financial services now constitute a large and increasing share of output in the world’s most advanced industrial nations. Financial institutions have grown to enormous size, magnified by various mechanisms of financial leverage. Capital markets have gained the ability to influence and limit national economic priorities. Financialization also influen...

The Economic and Social History Section, History Institute, Leiden University, will partner with the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI) to host a joint conference on June 2-5, 2015, under the theme "Agents, Networks, Institutions and Empires." According to the call for papers: Agents, networks and institutions are the cornerstones of empire-building. This applies to European and non-European empires, originating in the late Middle Ages, Early Modern, Modern or Contemporary period. The agency of individuals, by themselves or in various groups and communities, forged the first contacts between colonizers and colonized. At the same time, the individual and collective capacity to negotiate personal and communal interests brought about autonomy and forms of self-government in various colonized societies. Through perennial exchanges institutions were created, changed and adapted to the needs, demands and impositions of expanding empires. FEEGI has ...

The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, part of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Duke University, offers several grants for research travel to its collections. The Hartman Center holds an extensive collection of over 3,000,000 items — correspondence, publications, advertisements, photographs, slides, films, books and serials — that document the history of advertising, sales, and marketing over the past two centuries. In addition to the J. Walter Thompson (JWT) Company Archives, the most comprehensive historical record of any advertising agency, the Center contains the collections of other key companies and individuals in the dynamic fields of advertising and marketing. The grants available through the Hartman Center include the Alvin A. Achenbaum Travel Grants, which provide up to $750 in funding to support researchers in their use of any Hartman Center collections.The Hartman Center also offers two fellowships, ...

The 2015 American Historical Association Meeting will be held in New York City on January 2-5. The full program has now been published. As an affiliated member of the AHA, the Business History Conference is able to propose sponsored sessions. We are delighted to report that several of these proposals were accepted. The headline event will be a luncheon/roundtable discussion on January 4 organized around the theme of “Capitalism, Global Business, and Inequality”; speakers will be Richard R. John, Juliette Levy, Stephanie Decker, and Bartow Elmore, with BHC president Mary Yeager presiding.      Other BHC sessions are: AHA session  57 : Tipping in American History (chaired by Julia Ott) BHC Session 2 : The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: A Century of Protest Art (chaired by Daniel Levinson Wilk) AHA session 252 : Immigrant Women at the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century Marketplace (chaired by Tracey Deutsch, comment by Jocelyn Wills) AHA session 278 : Exce...

A recent NPR "Morning Edition" feature focused on "The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech" (audio and text). The program mentions particularly Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, as well as the resources of the Computer History Museum . The New York Times published two more essays on Edward Baptist's "The Half Has Never Been Told": "Harvesting Cotton-Field Capitalism: Edward Baptist’s New Book Follows the Money on Slavery" and a review by Eric Foner. Still on Baptist, there is an analytical post by Patrick Rael on the African American Intellectual History Society blog: "Capitalism's Slavery" ; and Tom Cuttenham over at The Junto continues the discussion with "Commodifying Labour, Commodifying People." Sad to report the death of well-known French business historian Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, on September 27; Hubert Bonin has published a homage . Some time ago, we reported on the efforts of busines...

The Journal of African American History has issued a call for papers for a special issue on " African Americans and Business: Race, Capitalism, and Power," to be edited by Juliet E. K. Walker and Shennette Garrett-Scott.  The call for papers states: Enterprising African American men and women shaped and were shaped by cultural, social, and political changes in U.S. society. Their relationship with the state and their engagement with discourses of race, gender, nation, and class help us understand the many ways African Americans have struggled to strike a tenable balance between personal agency and structural constraints. . . . African American entrepreneurs and businesses place political and economic histories in dialog with each other to underscore how race is fundamental—not incidental—to how business gets done. The editors seek essays that take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding African American business history. They welcome works that place African Ameri...

The Market Cultures Group of New York City has announced its fall schedule: Monday, October 27, 6 pm     Paul Clement, Fashion Institute of Technology     "Regional Integration and Globalization: The Developed vs. The Developing World" Tuesday, November 4, 6:30 pm     John Clegg, New York University     "Credit Market Discipline and Capitalist Slavery in Antebellum South Carolina" Tuesday, December 2, 6 pm     Ianthe Dugan, Wall Street Journal     Stephanie Capparell, Wall Street Journal     Mary Pilon, New York Times     "Writing History at the Wall Street Journal" All seminars take place at the Fashion Institute of Technology.  Attendees should enter at the Feldman (C) lobby on the north side of 27th Street, halfway between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and bring a photo ID.      Email Daniel Levinson Wilk to RSVP and request ...

A one-day conference, "The History and Future of Fashion Prediction: University Meets Industry," will be held Friday, October 17, 2014, from 9.00 am to 6.00 pm at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The conference has been organized by Erasmus University Rotterdam on behalf of The Enterprise of Culture: International Structures and Connections in the Fashion Industry . This event will bring together the scholarly world of fashion research and professionals of the international fashion industry, and opens the floor for debate. As explained by Ben Wubs, one of the organizers, Fashion prediction has played a tremendous role in the transformation of the fashion industry worldwide since the interwar period. However, fashion prediction is little understood by the public, despite the fact that it dramatically influences the collections every season. Although intermediaries and mediators have been active in the consolidating process of the fashion industry, their role has only been d...

The Association of Business Historians (ABH) will hold its 23rd annual conference on July 3-4, 2015, at the University of Exeter Business School's Streatham campus. The conference theme will be "Business and the Periphery," exploring the boundaries of business history. The conference committee will interpret this theme broadly to welcome paper and session proposals that address historical themes relating, but not limited, to business operating on economic, financial, geographical, social, political, religious, technological, legal, regulatory and other peripheries. The conference will feature a roundtable on "Business History after the Research Excellence Framework (REF)."     The Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop will precede the conference on July 2-3, 2015, and will be subject to a separate call, as will the Coleman Prize for the best Ph.D. thesis on business history completed on a British subject or at a British university.    Each individual paper ...

A reminder that the deadline is approaching for the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Business History; the due date for applications is October 15, 2014 .     This Fellowship will be awarded for twelve months’ residence, study, and research at Harvard Business School. The fellowship is open to scholars who, within the last ten years, have received a Ph.D. in history, economics, or a related discipline. The fellowship has two purposes: The first is to enable scholars to engage in research that will benefit from the resources of Harvard Business School and the larger Boston scholarly community. A travel fund and a book fund will be provided. The second is to provide an opportunity for the fellow to participate in the activities of Harvard Business School. The fellow is required to research and write a case, under the direction of a senior faculty member, to be used in one of the business history courses. The Fellowship will begin July 1.      App...