The Exchange

The Enterprise of Culture: International Structures and Connections in the Fashion Industry has announced that its next event will be a conference entitled " Entrepreneurship in Fashion: Student, Academic and Industry Perspectives ." The one-day meeting will be held in Edinburgh on March 5, 2015. Financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme, the conference has been organized by Enterprise of Culture team members based at the School of Management and Languages at Heriot-Watt University, Andrew MacLaren and Robert MacIntosh.      The conference will explore the changing structure of the European fashion business, with reference to the fashion intermediaries who work behind the scenes to run the fashion system.  According to the organizers, the conference will take the idea of fashion entrepreneurship and consider it in two novel ways: First, the day will give a platform for students, researching academics and active industry practitioners to off...

The web exhibit on the South Sea Bubble, "Sunk in Lucre's Sordid Charms," at Baker Library's Historical Collections focuses on the library's extensive collection on that topic, which includes more than 300 books, broadsides, pamphlets, Parliamentary documents, manuscripts, prints, and ephemera. Among the many items are digitized images of an entire set of playing cards , each one containing a bit of verse related to the Bubble. On the ace of diamonds depicted here, for example, is written: "An old Welch Justice mounted on a Goat/Is ask'd which way his Worship means to trot;/To London hur is Travelling, quoth he,/To sell Welch Copper, and to Buy South Sea."     A complete list of the digitized records can be found on the website.

The next annual conference of the Economic and Business History Society (EBHS) will be held in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on May 28-30, 2015. Proposals for presentations on any aspect of economic or business history are welcome, as are proposals for whole panels. Graduate students and non-academic affiliates are also welcome to submit proposals. According to the call for papers: The EBHS conference offers participants the opportunity for intellectual interchange with an international, interdisciplinary, and collegial group of scholars (typically about half our participants are from economics departments and half are from history or economic history departments). The EBHS prides itself on its openness to new members and we offer reduced conference fees for graduate students and early career researchers (four years or less since doctorate earned). Our regular registration fees are reasonable, as is the cost of accommodation at the conference venue. The keynote speaker at the conferenc...

The University of California at Santa Barbara will host a conference on September 24-26, 2015, on the topic “Beyond the New Deal Order.” The organizing committee (Nelson Lichtenstein and Alice O’Connor, UCSB, co-conveners; Steve Fraser, The Murphy Institute, CUNY; Gary Gerstle, University of Cambridge; Romain Huret, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; and Jean-Christian Vinel, Université Paris-Diderot) writes: When Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle edited The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order in 1989, they made the concept of a political and social “order” central to an interpretative framework that reperiodized U.S. history, from the election of Franklin Roosevelt, through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and on to Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. The New Deal was not just a presidential moment, but a far larger construction - a combination of ideas, policies, institutions, cultural norms and electoral dynamics - that spanned several decades and sustained a hegemonic gover...

The 2015 EABH ( European Association for Banking and Financial History ) conference will take place on May 15 in Prague, Czech Republic, hosted by the Czech National Bank and in cooperation with the Czech Banking Association. The theme of the meeting will be "Inflation: Does It Still Matter Today?" The conference will focus on the history of inflation, ranging from the Roman Empire to modern times. According to the organizers: Inflation is one of the biggest challenges for any country. If price levels rise all across the economy, nations can be threatened by impoverishment. Thirty years after the development of global disinflation (which occurred in the 1980s), does inflation still matter? Recent global developments challenge policy-makers. Does current US monetary policy bring dangers of inflation back to the global economy? Or is the contrary a greater concern: Is the Eurozone well on its way toward deflation? . . . The conference will focus on the history of inflation...

The next Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History (APEBH) Conference will take place at the University of New South Wales in Canberra on February 12-14, 2015. The theme will be “Recovery and Rebuilding,” but the organizers are open to proposals for contributions on other topics in economic, social, and business history, as well as to proposals for sessions on particular themes. Researchers across a broad range of disciplines are warmly welcomed. Early career researchers are encouraged to participate.     The conference organizers are particularly interested in attracting papers that examine developments in countries and regions in the Asia-Pacific region and papers that provide an international comparative perspective. As the call for papers states, Over the next few years we observe a series of anniversaries: 2015 marks 70 years since the end of World War II and the massive rebuilding required in Europe and Asia- and the first institutional outcomes from Bretton...

The BHC Doctoral Colloquium in Business History will take place in conjunction with the 2015 Business History Conference annual meeting , to be held jointly with the Euopean Business History Association on June 24-27 in Miami, Florida. This prestigious workshop, sponsored by the BHC and funded by Cambridge University Press, will take place at the conference site on Tuesday, June 23, and Wednesday, June 24. The colloquium is limited to ten students. Participants work intensively with a distinguished group of BHC-affiliated scholars that includes at least two BHC officers. The colloquium will discuss dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and employment opportunities in business history. This colloquium is intended for doctoral candidates in the early stages of their dissertation projects.     Those interested in being considered for this colloquium should submit a statement of interest, a CV, a preliminary or final dissertation prospec...

The Lemelson Center Fellowship Program and Travel to Collections Award Program support projects that present creative approaches to the study of invention and innovation in American society. These include, but are not limited to, historical research and documentation projects resulting in dissertations, publications, exhibitions, educational initiatives, documentary films, or other multimedia products. The programs provide access to the expertise of the Institution's research staff and the vast invention and technology collections of the National Museum of American History (NMAH). The NMAH Archives Center documents both individuals and firms across a range of time periods and subject areas. Representative collections include the Western Union Telegraph Company Records, ca. 1840-1994 and the Earl S. Tupper Papers, documenting Tupper, and his invention, Tupperware. In addition, the NMAH Library offers long runs of historical technology serials like Scientific American and A...

The next annual meeting of the Economic History Association will take place in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 11-13, 2015. The theme of the meeting will be "Diversity in Economic History." The call for papers states:   The program committee welcomes submissions on all subjects in economic history, though some preference will be given to papers that specifically fit the theme. Papers should be submitted individually, but authors may suggest to the Committee that three particular papers fit well together in a panel. Papers should in all cases be works in progress rather than accepted or published work. Submitters should let the program committee know at the time of application if the paper they are proposing has already been submitted for publication. Individuals who presented or co-authored a paper given at the 2014 meeting are not eligible for inclusion in the 2015 program. Proposals should be submitted on-line, using the EHA form . The submission deadline is J...

For those on Twitter but unable to attend: the 2014 SHOT meeting can be followed at #SHOT14; the Histories of Capitalism Conference at Cornell is at #HOC2014 . Update: Finn Arne Jørgensen has compiled the SHOT2014 tweets here on Storify. There is an extensive review essay in The Nation related to the slavery and capitalism debate: "Apostles of Growth" The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology in Kansas City, Missouri, has an interesting web exhibit on "The Transcontinental Railroad."   The library's holdings are a great resource for many areas of business history, and research fellowships are available. See the GIS website by Cameron Blevins at Stanford illustrating his research on "The Geography of the Post." The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at Hagley is making available audio records of many of its scholarly talks on SoundCloud . Among them will be the Center's new series, ...

The Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD) invites submissions for a workshop that explores the history of retailing and distribution in a rural context, to be held on May 13, 2015, at the University of Wolverhampton. Papers focusing on any historical period or geographical area are welcome. Some of the themes that might be considered include: The village shop Rural networks of supply Marketing and selling ‘the countryside’ Rural commodities, services and industries Transport, networks and consumer information The rural consumer Markets, fairs and peddlers Representations of rural retail. Retailing, distribution and agriculture To submit a proposal, please send title and abstract of c.300 to 400 words to Laura Ugolini, at l.ugolini@wlv.ac.uk by February 13, 2015 .     For further information, please e-mail: Laura Ugolini at l.ugolini@wlv.ac.uk or Karin Dannehl at k.dannehl@wlv.ac.uk .

According to its website, The Duanaire project borrows the Irish word for song-book or anthology (loosely, a 'treasury'), to convey the sense of a rich, varied corpus handed down and explored anew. This project, led by Dr Aidan Kane (economics at NUI Galway), will open up a wealth of Irish economic history data, and in particular, Irish fiscal history data, by making accessible online a range of datasets in flexible forms to diverse audiences. The project is constructing a unique infrastructure for the imaginative curation, exploration, and sharing of significant tranches of Irish economic history data. Duanaire's first release is a dataset of the public finances of Ireland in the eighteenth century. The core sources are the detailed accounts of revenues and expenditures printed in the Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland throughout the 1700s. These accounts are presented online in a variety of ways: one can browse the accounts year-by-y...

The Tenth Annual Appalachian Spring Conference in World History and Economics , an interdisciplinary meeting aimed at bringing together scholars from Appalachian State University (Boone, NC) and scholars from other universities in North Carolina, the surrounding states, and abroad, will hold its next meeting on April 10-11, 2015, on the Appalachian State University campus. The theme will be "The History and Nature of Capitalism"; though paper or panel proposals do not have to be directly tied to the conference theme, papers fitting with the theme will be given special consideration.     The 2015 keynote speaker will be Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a world-renowned scholar of economic history and the history of capitalism.   Those interested in participating should let the organizers know by February 10, 2015 . A one-page abstract describing the scholar’s...