Business and Economic History at the OAH Meeting

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 Maryland, "States, Not Nation: The Sources of Political and Economic Development in the Early United States"

Friday, 1:50 p.m. "Unconventional Profits: Exploring the Fringes of Business Culture" (p. 40)
Chair: Rahima Schwenkbeck, George Washington University
    Rahima Schwenkbeck, George Washington University, "A New Kind of Company Town: Shiloh Farms and the Embodiment of the Community as Corporation"
    Jeffrey Smith, Lindenwood University, "Cemeteries as Paradox: How the Living Used the City of the Dead"
    Emily Dufton, George Washington University, " 'The Phillip Morris of Marijuana': New Business Practices in the World of Pot"
    Evelyn Krache Morris, JFK School of Government, Harvard University, "Cleaning Up: Multinational Banks, Money Laundering, and the Taboo against Prosecution"

    Also of interest, "New Research in the Economics of Slavery" (p. 37) and "Illicit Economies and Taboo Trades: Excavating the Politics of Black Female Sexuality in Vaudeville, Pornography, and Prostitution in Twentieth-Century-America" (p. 38)
    And these individual papers:

Thursday, 1:45 p.m.: Chloe Northrop, University of North Texas
"Sentimentality and Material Goods: Family and Exchange in the Post-Revolutionary Loyalist Diaspora" (p. 28)
Friday, 10:50, Dael Norwood, "Laying in the Cut: Opium Trafficking in China and the Politics of American Merchants’ Discretion" (p. 38)
Friday, 1:50 p.m.: Kim Phillips-Fein, New York University, "The Nation and the Labor Movement, 1900–1940" (p. 42)
Friday, 1:50 p.m.:  Amy Shore, State University of New York at Oswego, "When Women Occupy Wall Street" (p. 40)
Friday, 1:50 p.m.: Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, University of California, Davis, will participate in a panel on women's history in the Early Republic (p. 41)
Saturday, 1:50 p.m.: Carl Ekberg, Illinois State University, "Négociants, Commerçants, and Voyageurs: Foundations of the St. Louis Fur Trade" (p. 51)
Sunday, 10:45 a.m.: Ian Saxine, Bates College, "Buying Empire: Land Companies, Mapmakers, and the Struggle for the Maine Frontier, 1749–1763" (p. 56)

The program also features a number of related sessions on labor history, slavery, agriculture, gender, and immigration.