The Exchange

Each year the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) sponsors a series of summer programs for K-12 teachers and educators. Of particular interest in 2015 are: "Rethinking the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Capitalism, Democracy, and Progressivisms, 1877 to 1920" (University of Chicago) "Immigration, Migration, and the Transformation of the African-American Community in the 20th and 21st Centuries" (Schomburg Center, New York Public Library) "The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1865" (American Antiquarian Society) "Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition and Ideas of Progress" (Buffalo State SUNY) "Crafting Freedom: African-American Entrepreneurs in the Antebellum South" (Thomas Day Education Project, Research Triangle Park, NC) "Forge of Innovation: The Springfield Armory and the Genesis of American Industry" (Springfield, MA) "Inventing America: Lowell and the Industrial Revolution" (Lo...

With an online exhibit, "Cleared to Land: The Records of Pan American World Airways, Inc.," the University of Miami Libraries Special Collections division announces the enhanced cataloging of this significant collection. The collection contains "[f]ifteen hundred boxes of administrative, legal, financial, technical, and promotional materials as well as internal publications, photographs, audiovisual material and graphic material." With a grant from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, the library staff has organized the PanAm records into eighteen thematic groups with over three hundred sub-themes to assist those searching the collection. To aid researchers, the library has prepared a visualization of the thematic outline . There is also an extensive Finding Aid , prepared by project archivist Emily Gibson. According to the website, "The end result is a collection that has been thematically mapped, mended, and preserved for generati...

Media coverage of Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton continues: Beckert has an essay focusing on the book in The Atlantic and is interviewed by Diane Rehm on NPR. BackStory has an interesting episode on the railroads and the standardization of time zones, "High Noons." The World Economic Forum blog features an essay by Simon Ville , professor of economic and business history at the University of Wollongong, on "Why We Need to Teach Economic History." Jeremy Adelman and Jonathan Levy describe "The Fall and Rise of Economic History" in a recent Chronicle Review issue (this is gated, but viewable at the Chronicle by those whose institutions subscribe, or here , in an ungated copy). Congratulations to Jennifer Klein of Yale University, who has been awarded the 2014 Hans Sigrist Prize by the Hans Sigrist Foundation at the University of Bern in Switzerland for her contribution to the field of “Women and Precarity: Historical Perspectives.” ...

The consumer aspects of the Christmas season affect everyone, even those who do not celebrate the holiday. With this in mind, our own small gift is a selection of websites focusing on the history of (Christmas) shopping: Histocrats in the Classroom has a feature on "Gilded Age Christmas Shopping" Backstory Radio offers "Counter Culture: A History of Shopping" (with commentary from, among others, Elaine Abelson, Louis Hyman, and T. H. Breen) "The Commercial Christmas," from BBC History Magazine Slate , explaining that Christmas shopping season has started "early" since Victorian times "An Economist Goes Christmas Shopping," from the New York Times , by Josh Barro, son of Harvard economist Robert Barro, and "If Economists Wrote Christmas Cards," from The Atlantic (and the poll about gift-giving on which the piece is based) Slate, again, with "The Original War on Christmas" and the Society for the Preve...

The XVIIth World Economic History Congress (WEHC) will meet in Kyoto, Japan, on August 3-7, 2015, around the theme of "Diversity in Development." The accepted sessions have now been posted to the Congress website.     The site provides links to abstracts and expected participants for each session, as well as notices from those session organizers seeking papers. Among many relevant sessions, some of particular interest to BHC members include: S20035 , organized by Tom French: "The Economic and Business History of Occupied Japan" S20039 , organized by Hugh Rockoff: "How Financial Networks Become Vulnerable to Crises: A Global and Historical Perspective" S20058 , organized by Robin Pearson: "Risk Management, Insurance and Organisational Choice in History" S20068 , organized by Peter Coclanis: "Diversity in the Development of the U.S. South" S20083 , organized by Geoffrey Jones: "Shibusawa Eiichi’s Gappon Capitalism (Ethic...

The Business History Conference announces its search for a new Web Editor to oversee its online presence as an organization.     The new Editor will succeed the current Web Editor, Pat Denault, who will be permanently stepping down as of June 2015. The new Editor's term would officially start in March 2015 (running for 3 months concurrently with the present editor), runs for three years, and is renewable.     The BHC Trustees recently approved the appointment of Shane Hamilton as Web Administrator, in charge of developing and maintaining the website's content management software. The Web Editor will thus not need special technical skills in website design or server operations, but should instead be prepared to focus solely on matters of producing and updating content and information for our membership. The ongoing responsibilities of the Web Editor include the following: Posting annual meeting materials. This involves both proactively contacting peop...

America on the Move is a physical exhibit at the National Museum of American History with a strong online component. The Museum’s online transportation collection includes more than a thousand artifacts and photographs. The web version of the exhibit provides numerous ways to explore the material, including a chronologically divided set of sections spamming times pre-1876 through 2000. In addition to the visual materials, there are a number of thematic "stories," featuring many essays divided into topics such as "work and lesiure," "technology," and "immigration." The site also includes a list of learning resources such as self-guided tours, a "classroom activity guide," a reading list, and a list of other web links.

The current issue of the Chronicle Review has a long essay by Sven Beckert on "Slavery and Capitalism" : "What distinguishes today's historians of capitalism is that they insist on its contingent nature, tracing how it has changed over time as it has revolutionized societies, technologies, states, and many if not all facets of life." Citing scholars including Seth Rockman, Edward Baptist, Caitlin Rosenthal, and Walter Johnson, Beckert concludes that There are still many open questions about slavery and capitalism, some specific, some broad. We have not yet conclusively shown, for example, how methods of labor control migrated from the world of the plantation to the world of the factory. We need more-detailed research on where the profits from slavery accumulated in Europe and the American North, and how they mattered to other sectors of the economy. We would benefit from a better understanding of how the tight economic connection between Northern entre...

Baker Library recently opened a new exhibition, Georges F. Doriot: Educating Leaders, Building Companies . The physical exhibition, which will run through August 3, 2015, in the North Lobby, Baker Library | Bloomberg Center, Harvard Business School, is accompanied by an extensive website. According to Laura Linard, director of Baker Library Special Collections: Baker Library recently opened a new exhibition, The exhibition and related website examine the career of Georges F. Doriot, an educator and a founder of the modern venture capital industry. During his 40-year tenure at Harvard Business School, the charismatic professor taught business and leadership in his celebrated Manufacturing course to nearly 7,000 students. He realized his dream of establishing the first Master of Business Administration program in Europe by helping establish the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD). Doriot learned the art of bringing science and industry together in World War II,...

The annual Cliometric Society Conference in 2015 will be held on the weekend of Friday, May 15, through Sunday, May 17, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and hosted by the University of Michigan and the National Science Foundation. The conference is designed to provide extensive discussion of new and innovative research in economic history. Applicants from all continents and papers addressing important topics in economic history for all countries will be considered. Interdisciplinary research is particularly encouraged.      Applications to present papers or to attend the conference are welcome from graduate students, junior faculty, and senior faculty in economic history, as well as from distinguished faculty in other fields who have research interests in economic history. Typically, twelve papers are selected for presentation and discussion. All participants are required to have read all papers and to attend the entire conference--that is, arrive bef...

Stephen Mihm had an article in the New York Times Sunday Review on "Why CEOs Are Growing Beards." Sven Beckert was in the news: his new book, Empire of Cotton , was the subject of a review in Slate by Eric Herschthal; and Beckert can be heard discussing his research in a broader context on Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon. The Junto had a post on "Economic Growth and the Historicity of Capitalism," by Tom Cutterham. More on Edward Baptist and "The Half Has Never Been Told" : Brett Rushforth has posted a compilation of reviews and responses to date. Congratulations to Richard Roberts, winner of the 2014 Wadsworth Prize for Business History , presented by the Business Archives Council; the prize was awarded to Roberts for Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 (Oxford University Press). The George Washington Financial Papers Project at the University of Virginia aims to produce a digital-only edition of these materia...

This week the Business History Conference launched its new website . The URL remains the same, but the site has been enhanced and updated in many ways, thanks largely to the efforts of Shane Hamilton (who, as the BHC web administrator, will manage the website's background workings), with assistance from current web editor Pat Denault (who will step down in June 2015). The new site is built with Drupal, an easy to use content management system that will allow those working on the site to focus on content rather than technical aspects.     The new design aims to bring to the fore the rich material to be found on the BHC website--syllabi, web resources, interest-group bibliographies, and current books of interest--as well as information about the organization's governance, history, and annual meetings.     One of the most important improvements is a dynamic members-only space that permits BHC members to post information directly: BHC members can add job l...

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) will hold its 2016 meeting on April 7-10 in Providence, Rhode Island. The theme of the meeting will be "On Leadership." The call for papers states: In this presidential election year the Program Committee invites proposals addressing the theme "On Leadership" and exploring any aspect of leadership in American history. The character, origin, and practice of leadership; its successes, achievements, disappointments, and failures in any and every area of American life from the earliest years of human settlement to the early twenty-first century will be the principal topics of the 2016 OAH Annual Meeting. . . . Proposals may consider leadership as it applies to any aspect of American history, including—though certainly not limited to—politics, revolts, economics, race, gender, reform, technology, education, religion, agriculture, arts, resistance, sports, entertainment, research, communications, sexuality, literature, s...

The early papers of the U.S. War Office, from 1784 to 1800, were destroyed by fire in 1800. Continuing a project begun over a decade ago, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has searched local repositories in the United States and Europe to find copies of the early documents and to digitize them. Over 45,000 documents have been found, consisting of hundreds of thousands of pages; the beginnings of the project are now available online at Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 . The archive contains many different kinds of documents in addition to traditional correspondence, such as accountant records, Indian treaties, inventories of equipment, and draft notes. According to the project website: These Papers record far more than the era’s military history. Between 1784 and 1800, the War Department was responsible for Indian affairs, veteran affairs, naval affairs (until 1798), as well as militia and army matters. During the 1790s, the...