The Exchange

The Borns Jewish Studies Program and the Department of History at Indiana University, Bloomington, invite proposals for papers to be presented at a workshop on “Jewish Commercial Cultures in Global Perspective.” The workshop will take place October 11-12, 2015, and will feature new research on Jews and commerce in the period in the period in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. According to the call for papers, We seek paper proposals specifically from junior scholars (advance PhD, post-doctoral and early career historians) whose work will be engaged by established Jewish, economic, and global historians participating as keynote speakers, panel discussants and roundtable participants. The workshop aims to introduce the notion of “Jewish commercial cultures” to discussions about networks, mobility, empires, migration and material life. We welcome especially proposals that examine Jewish merchants beyond trading diaspora frameworks, the overly determining cont...

Daniel Levinson Wilk has announced the schedule for the Spring 2015 season of the Market Cultures Group NYC: Thursday, March 5, 6 pm Heather R. Lee , Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Merchants Under Exclusion: Transnational Capital, Migrant Labor, and Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 1850-1943” Comment by Louis Pechman, Pechman Law Group PLLC Wednesday, March 18, 6 pm Luca Petruzzellis , University of Bari Aldo Moro, and C. Samuel Craig , New York University “Separate but Together: Mediterranean Identity in Three Countries” Comment by Shawn Grain Carter, Fashion Institute of Technology Monday, April 6, 6 pm Richard John , Columbia School of Journalism “Anti-Monopoly: An American History” Comment by Mary Pilon, author of The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game   All seminars are at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Attendees should enter at the Feldman (C) lobby on the north side of 27th Street, halfway be...

The next annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on October 8-11, 2015. According to the call for papers , . . . the Program Committee invites paper and session proposals on any topic in a broadly defined history of technology, including topics that push the boundaries of the discipline. The Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers or complete sessions from researchers at all levels. We also welcome proposals from all researchers, whether veterans or newcomers to SHOT's meetings, and regardless of primary discipline. Submitters are encouraged to propose sessions that include a diverse mix of participants: multinational origins, gender, graduate students and junior scholars with senior scholars, significantly diverse institutional affiliations, etc. SHOT has three categories of submissions: individual papers; 3-4 paper sessions; and "unconventional" sessions such as roundtables and works...

The program for the 2015 annual meeting of the European Association for Banking and Financial History (EABH) has now been posted. The meeting will be held on May 15, 2015 at the Czech National Bank, CNB Congress Centre, in Prague, Czech Republic, in cooperation with the Czech National Bank and the Czech Banking Association. The theme of the meeting is "Inflation in History, the History of Inflation." As the organizers state, In this meeting we want to gain a better understanding of what is actually available in financial institutions' archives, and to identify promising areas for future research or action. The objective is to look at what is new about inflation. Can historical instances of inflation provide tools for a better understanding of modern developments? Should present day monetary authorities and decision takers be aware of these lessons as they cope with the challenges for the global economy? The program and registration information can be found here . Ple...

The 8th European Business History Association (EBHA) Doctoral Summer School will take place in Ancona, Italy, from September 7 to 12, 2015. The theme will be "Business History: Debates, Challenges, and Opportunities."     The school aims to provide doctoral students with an overview of relevant research results and of innovative tools and methodologies in the field of business history. It is organized jointly by the European Business History Association (EBHA), the University of Ancona, and the Italian Association for Business History (ASSI). Students will be accommodated in the beautiful town of Ancona while debating and discussing their research with leading international scholars. The school will focus on theoretical, methodological, and practical issues of relevance for advanced research in business history. The main aim of the school is to provide students with a full understanding of the newest trends in research in the field and to provide a friendly atmosphere i...

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) will hold its annual meeting on April 16-19, 2015, in St. Louis, Missouri. The theme of the meeting is "Taboos." Selected sessions of interest are listed below; the OAH program, available in full here , is not (yet) interactive, so sessions are identified by page number on the program pdf. Friday, 9:00 a.m. "Where the Action Was: The Local Roots of Economic and Political Development in Early American History" ( Sponsored by the Economic History Association ) (p. 34) Chair: David Konig, Washington University in St. Louis Commentators: David Konig, Washington University in St. Louis; John Majewski, University of California, Santa Barbara     Claire Priest, Yale Law School, "The Origins of Economic Institutions in Colonial America"     Eric Hilt, Wellesley College, "The Corporation and Democratic Change: New York, 1791–1826"     Naomi Lamoreaux, Yale University; John Wallis, University of Maryl...

In honor of the date, we begin with a post from the National Museum of American History offering a brief history of the telegraph and telephone as communication media for valentines, "Love on the Lines."   Followed by "Mother of the Valentine," from the American Antiquarian Society blog, about Esther Howland and the birth of the valentine industry in the United States. And finally, from the Ms. Magazine blog, vintage valentines promoting women's suffrage. Open access articles of interest:    The Journal of American History has made 38 articles freely available under the rubric Editor's Choice ; they include the essays from the special issue on the history of oil and from a Roundtable on conservatism.   The Journal of Economic History has made "American Banking and the Transportation Revolution before the Civil War," by Jeremy Atack, Matthew Jaremski, and Peter L. Rousseau ungated until March 1. "Conversant," the blog of the ...

From the McNeil Center for Early American Studies comes this call for papers for a graduate student conference: “How soon is evil done!” Hugh Blair exclaimed from his Edinburgh pulpit in a sermon published in 1777. “There needs no great bustle or stir, no long preparation of events, to overturn what seems most secure, and to blast what appears most flourishing.”     In the early modern Anglophone world, the words “bustle” and “stir” referred to the dynamic, contingent, and at times transformational experiences of social and economic life. Inspired by these terms—and acknowledging the threat they posed to men like Blair and the promise they sometimes conveyed to less well placed women and men—this conference will reconsider movement and exchange in early America and in the broader Atlantic world in Indigenous, African, and European contexts in the period before 1850.     We are interested in movers and shakers from all walks of life, whether such act...

The Global Capitalism Initiative and the University of Georgia History Department will host a graduate student conference on May 14-16, 2015, on the theme "Global Capitalism and the Global South." The meeting will take place at the Zell B. Miller Learning Center at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. As the organizers explain, "The study of capitalism has seen a resurgence in academia. New ways of looking at old questions have challenged the established narratives between capital and social relationships. The University of Georgia Graduate Student Conference on Global Capitalism and the Global South will enable junior scholars to explore capitalism as a category of historical analysis."     The organizers invite graduate students to submit papers that engage with capitalism in its many forms. Submissions that pertain to the global South, explore how capitalism has shifted with the growth of the world economy, or connect capitalism to any historiog...

This year's British Academy of Management (BAM) conference will be hosted by the University of Portsmouth on September 8-10, 2015. The Management and Business History Track chairs, Kevin Tennent and Sasha Hodgson, have issued a call for papers: This track aims to encourage the growing number of management and business historians who work in business schools and social science departments to engage in constructive debate with a wide range of management scholars. The 2015 conference theme, the value of pluralism, is an ideal opportunity to explore the value of historical study for management research. . . . We would particularly welcome papers either using new and innovative methodologies, or applying archival methodology to a new disciplinary context. We also welcome context specific papers using more traditional historical methodology but which take innovative approaches to relate their findings to wider social science concerns. Papers looking at the history of the management...

Given that the theme of the upcoming BHC/EBHA joint meeting is "Inequalities," the moment seems particularly apt to highlight a new website, Clio Infra: Reconstructing Global Inequality , which constructs long-term economic series on a broad set of quantitative indicators of global well-being. Under the leadership of Jan Luiten van Zanden, " a set of interconnected databases has been set up containing worldwide data on social, economic, and institutional indicators for the past five centuries, with special attention to the past 200 years. These indicators allow research into long-term development of worldwide economic growth and inequality." The site includes a large number of datasets currently available, specific publications and presentations of the project, and a visualization tool that presents data in map and chart form. All Clio Infra datasets will also be archived by Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS).

[Please note that  this workshop is taking place immediately before the joint BHC/EBHA meeting in Miami and at the same location; those accepted for the workshop are welcome to register for and attend that meeting, but this workshop is organized separately under different auspices. Those interested in applying for the Paper Development Workshop should contact the organizers listed below, not the BHC or EBHA.] A Paper Development Workshop (PDW) will be held on Wednesday, June 24, 2015, from noon to 5 p.m., at the Hyatt Regency Miami in MIami, Florida.      In recent years, both business historians and entrepreneurship scholars have grown increasingly interested in the promise of using historical sources, methods and reasoning in entrepreneurship research. History, it has been argued, can be valuable in addressing a number of limitations in traditional approaches to studying entrepreneurship, including in accounting for contexts and institutions, in under...

The 2015 Asia Pacific Economic and Business History (APEBH) Conference will be held at the University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia, on February 12-14. The conference is organized annually by the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand . The draft program has recently been posted on the APEBH meeting site. Session titles include 1: The Australian Wool and Wheat Industries 2: Disaster Recovery 3: Labour Supply 4: Recovering from Famine in the USSR and China 5: Demographic Change 6: Countries in Crisis 7: Asian Development Strategies 8: Australasian Economic History 9: Transformations of Manufacturing 10: Migration and Human Capital 11: South East Asian Economic History 12: Governments and Markets The meeting's Noel Butlin Lecture will be given by Richard Steckel of the Department of Economics, Ohio State University.     For registration and other information, please check the conference website .