Skip to main content

Over the Counter: Issue No. 14


"The Vault" at Slate recently displayed a telephone map of the United States in 1910, showing where lines existed at that time. The original source is the David Rumsey Map Collection.

98 Acres in Albany is a community history project dedicated to documenting the people displaced and the structures demolished to make way for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza. The goal is to digitally reconstruct and repopulate the 40 city blocks as they were in 1962. The website is the creation of Ann Pfau (independent historian), David Hochfelder (University of Albany), and Stacy Sewell (St. Thomas Aquinas College).

Jonathan Coopersmith has become a blogger for HNN, with a series called "Infinity, Limited."

A number of recent texts of interest have been in the news:
  • At New Books in History, Gavin Wright is interviewed about Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Harvard University Press).
  • Steve Fraser's The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little, Brown) was reviewed by Naomi Klein in the New York Times; Fraser can be heard discussing the book on NPR's On Point; and he writes about the book on the History News Network.
  • Claire Potter, who writes the "Tenured Radical" blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education, focuses on Michael Zakim's article on "Paperwork" in the journal Raritan (vol. 33, no. 4).
  • The Spectator has a review of Richard Davenport-Hines' recent biography of John Maynard Keynes, Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (Collins).
  • Cambridge University Press has posted a YouTube interview with Simon Ville, co-editor (with Glenn Withers) of the Cambridge Economic History of Australia.
The Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford recently held a conference on "Gold Rush Imperialism: Gold Mining and Global History in the Age of Imperialism, c.1848-1914." The program is available here.

The blog for JF Plak Science Books has posted an interesting array of illustrations from a World War II propaganda publication, The Battle of Supplies.

William Lazonick has won the annual McKinsey Award for the most influential article published in the 2014 volume of the Harvard Business Review. He was awarded the prize for his article, "Profits without Prosperity" from the September 2014 issue. He is interviewed about the article here.

Last month the History Department at the University of Birmingham sponsored a workshop in honor of Francesca Carnevali, "Economic History as if People Mattered." The program is available here.

On C-Span's Book TV, we have a video of Sven Beckert discussing his book Empire of Cotton at the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School for Social Research. Beckert was introduced by Julia Ott of the New School (about 7 minutes in).

One can also see Julia Ott and Louis Hyman discussing the history of capitalism at the University of Virginia's Miller Center in January.

Popular posts from this blog

The Exchange has moved to the BHC's website

  Dear members subscribers of The Exchange   The Exchange, the weblog of the BHC, is now part of our website ( https://thebhc.org ). We migrated the blog to serve our membership and interested parties best since Blogger is discontinuing its email service.   Note that this will be the last message we will send from Blogger .   The Exchange was founded by Pat Denault over a decade ago, and it has become an essential channel for announcements from and about the BHC and from our subscribers and members. Announcements from The Exchange will come up on the News section of our website as they did before. However, if you wish to receive these announcements via email, and you have not done so yet, please subscribe to The Exchange by: Going to our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org ), s crolling down to the end of the page, and clicking on "Subscribe to the Latest BHC News." Or go to the “News” section of our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org/ ),   and click on “The

Regina Blaszczyk on the Business of Color

In September, MIT Press published Regina Lee Blaszczyk 's book, The Color Revolution , in which she "traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture." Readers can see some of the 121 color illustrations featured in the book at the MIT PressLog here and here . The author has recently written an essay on her research for the book in the Hagley Archives for the Hagley Library and Archives newsletter.    Reviews can be found in the New York Times , The Atlantic , Leonardo , and Imprint ; one can listen to an audio interview with Reggie Blaszczyk, and read her posts, "How Auto Shows Sparked a Color Revolution" on the Echoes blog and "True Blue: DuPont and the Color Revolution" on the Chemical Heritage Foundation website . Also available is a CHF video of the author discussing another excerpt from her rese

New resource available: Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography

Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography The Business History Conference is working to facilitate the creation of a bibliography of scholarly work on race and business history. We hope that the bibliography will serve as a resource for those seeking to create more inclusive syllabi and understand the historical context for our present moment of reckoning with structural racism in the United States and across the globe. The bibliography is crowdsourced and draws on the collective expertise of the BHC membership. The BHC wishes to expand the list of references already curated and invites your contributions to the bibliography (The current list of references contains 154 titles). Submit your suggestions by (a) emailing additional references to Anne Fleming of the BHC Electronic Media Oversight Committee <acf80 at law.georgetown.ed> or BHC Web Editor Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez <padelacruzf at gmail.com>, (b) tweeting titles to @TheBHCNews or (c) adding it