The Exchange

A new organization for Canadian business history is being formed: the Canadian Business History Association/ l’association Canadienne pour l’histoire des affaires (CBHA/ACHA). According to the group's new website , Our specific aims include encouraging more studies of enterprise by Canadians and in Canada, helping build and maintain well-structured and open business archives, providing those who study business history a forum for discussing their research with those who practice business, encouraging research projects on relevant subjects and providing funding for such research,  and in general encouraging the study of business history in Canada. The group is in its formative stages and has not yet opened to membership, but this step will occur in the near future. The CBHA/ACHA intends to hold its first general meeting in October 2015, when it will combine a symposium on business history associations in the world, business history in Canada, and its first annual meeting...

The Samuel C. Williams Library and the College of Arts and Letters at Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NJ) are holding a conference on September 24-25, 2015, " Taylor's World ," to celebrate the achievements and legacy of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was a Stevens graduate. This conference marks the centennial of Taylor’s death in 1915, and will explore both Taylor’s place in history and his legacy in the twenty-first century. The program has now been posted, as well as information about accommodations and registration. Online registration must be completed by September 3 . General questions regarding the "Taylor’s World" conference can be directed to Leah Loscutoff: lloscuto@stevens.edu .

The Institute of Historical Research, in collaboration with Senate House Library, has announced the launch of a new online exhibition of digitized fashion catalogues from the First World War: " Fashion and Consumption in the First World War: Department Store Catalogues 1916-17." These select catalogues of women’s clothing illustrate the war’s impact on materials, the roles of women, and fashion itself. According to Dr. Jordan Landes, research librarian at the Senate House Library, "The combined impacts of lower consumer spending, reduced availability of higher quality fabrics and a growing need for clothing that allowed freedom of movement for women to work shaped the fashions following 1915." The site includes short essays on relevant topics and many full catalogues from the period.

The Tawney Lecture is given each year at the annual conference of the Economic History Society (EHS). In 2015, the Lecture was presented by Martin Daunton, Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge. His topic was "Contesting Reconstruction: Remaking the Global Economic Order." According to the précis, Daunton considers the conflicting and contested notions of the reconstruction of the world economy after the Second World War. He shows how the debates at Bretton Woods should be placed in a much wider context than monetary policy. . . . The proposals reflected different relations between domestic and international politics in each country; and the outcome reflected the ability to balance these competing imperatives, the success in building coalitions around ideas or interests, and the design of the international institutions. The video of the talk is available on the EHS website. The EHS we...

The Business History Conference's annual meeting , this year to be held jointly with the European Business History Association , begins next Wednesday in Miami, Florida. On-line registration is now closed, but it is still possible to register in person.     As reported earlier, the keynote address will be given by Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics; he and his 2014 book, Capital in the 21st Century (Harvard University Press) have been much in the news during the year. Readers following the discussion may be interested in two recent sources: On May 11, 2015, the London School of Economics hosted "Inequality in the Twenty-First Century: A Day Long Engagement with Thomas Piketty. " Audio, video, and other materials from the meeting are available on the LSE website. In the June issue of the New York Review of Books, Piketty published a review of Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality What Can Be Done? (Harvard University Press, 2015), under the title "A Prac...

The Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (SEJ) has issued a call for papers for a special issue on "Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Research: Investigating Context, Time, and Change in Entrepreneurial Processes." Guest editors for the issue will be R. Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific; David A. Kirsch, University of Maryland; William B. Gartner, California Lutheran University and Copenhagen Business School; Friederike Welter, IfM Bonn and University of Siegen, Germany; and Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Business School.     According to the call for papers, For this special issue, we seek theoretical and empirical work that significantly advances our understanding of whether and how historical research and reasoning can contribute to our understanding of entrepreneurship. In this regard, we encourage submissions that not only make contributions to entrepreneurship research and theory, but also engage the methodological and theoretical issues involved in usin...

The "Places of Invention" exhibition will open on July 1, 2015 at the Smithsonian Museum's Lemelson Center for the Study of Innovation and Invention in Washington, DC. According to the website, "the exhibition will take visitors on a journey through time and place to meet people who lived, worked, played, collaborated, adapted, took risks, solved problems, and sometimes failed—all in the pursuit of something new." The physical exhibit will feature six communities: Silicon Valley, 1970-80s; the Bronx, 1970s; Medical Alley, 1950s; Hartford, late 1800s; Hollywood, 1930s; and Fort Collins, 2010. The accompanying website includes an interactive map detailing many more "places of invention," with their accompanying stories.This is an ongoing project, with more materials to be added to the online version over time.

The next meeting of the Economic History Association (EHA) will be held on September 11-13, 2015, in Nashville, Tennessee. The theme of the meeting is "Diversity in Economic History." The program has now been posted on the EHA website; readers can also access the full conference brochure , which contains information about accommodations and travel. The deadline for receiving the group rate at the conference hotel is August 10 .     The EHA is marking its 75th anniversary; the presidential address will be delivered by Robert Margo, who will speak on "Obama, Katrina, and the Persistence of Racial Inequality." For more information, please consult the conference website . Questions may be addressed to Jari Eloranta .

The SEC Historical Society launched a new gallery last month, " The Open Door: Roles of Women in Securities Regulation." As the website explains: Both the SEC and the NASD [National Association of Securities Dealers] afforded opportunities for work and advancement, opening a door for professional inclusion in an industry often deemed to be closed to women. The Gallery highlights how women working in securities regulation have progressed over the decades, from roles and jobs defined by their gender, to opportunities recognizing their professional expertise and experiences. Working with their male colleagues, the contributions of women, with increasing authority and prominence, have had and continue to have a profound effect in meeting the challenges of regulation. The site includes essays on the roles of women over time and links to many documents and images from the SEC holdings, including letters, memos, and oral history transcripts.

The Economist 's "Free exchange" blog in April had an essay on "Economic History Is Dead; Long Live Economic History?" Two recent posts of interest from the Early Americanist blog, The Junto: Jordan Smith, a Ph.D. Candidate in Atlantic History at Georgetown University, writes about "Disaster, Death, and Distilleries." His dissertation, “The Invention of Rum,” investigates the development and production of rum in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Atlantic World. And Chryssa Sharp, an associate professor of International Business at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri, discusses "Incorporating History and the Humanities into International Business." Kendra Boyd of Rutgers University has been awarded an Albert J. Beveridge Grant by the American Historical Association for her work on "Freedom Enterprise: The Great Migration and Black Entrepreneurship in Detroit." The Hagley Center for the History of Busine...

The Association of Business Historians will hold its next annual meeting at the University of Exeter Business School on July 3-4, 2015. The full program has now been posted on the ABH website. The theme for the conference is "Business and the Periphery." The keynote address will be delivered by Grietjie Verhoef of the University of Johannesburg, on "Latecomer Challenge: African Multinationals from the Periphery." Information about registration and accommodations can be found here . The booking deadline is June 24 .

The Centre for Port and Maritime History Annual Conference, this year on "The Environmental Histories of Ports and Ocean Trade," will take place in Liverpool on September 18-19, 2015. According to the call for papers, Throughout history, humans have exchanged and traded in biological agents, specimens, and commodities, often with very dramatic and unequal effects on environments and ecologies, cultures, nations, and economies. . . . Building on a growing interest in integrating environmental history with other sub-disciplines, this two-day conference will reflect on environmental histories of port cities and ocean trade. For a fuller description of the conference theme, please consult the complete call for papers . Propoals, for either single papers or full panels, should be sent to Andrew Popp at andrew.popp@liverpool.ac.uk by June 30, 2015.

Researchers interested in exploring multiple aspects of the history of free people of color in Louisiana can now do so in a recently released, free online resource available at http://www.lib.lsu.edu/ special/fpoc/ . “Free People of Color in Louisiana: Revealing an Unknown Past,” is a collaborative digital project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that brings together and provides access to over 30,000 pages of family and personal papers, business records, and public documents from the LSU Libraries’ Special Collections, the Louisiana State Museum Historical Center, the Historic New Orleans Collection, Tulane University’s Louisiana Research Collection, and New Orleans Public Library. From the website: Relatively few collections of papers from free families of color survive in archives in Louisiana, nor are they numerous in archives elsewhere in the United States. The most extensive collections of family papers for free people of color held by Louisiana repos...