The Exchange

The Corning Museum of Glass will celebrate the 100th birthday of Pyrex, a heat-resistant glass developed at Corning Glass Works, by devoting the 54th Annual Glass Seminar to "Pyrex and Material Culture." Speakers include academic researchers on material life, domestic life, the history of architecture and space, and the history of food, along with designers and marketers from Corning, Inc., as well as antique dealers and collectors. Reggie Blaszczyk, professor of Business History and Leadership Chair in the History of Business and Society at the University of Leeds, will give the keynote address on the history of Pyrex, drawing on research for her book, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Imagining Consumers was the first book to examine the innovation process behind Pyrex, digging deep into the archives to explain how chemists, physicists, and home economists developed a household glass that didn...

Christy Ford Chapin , assistant professor in the history department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), has written a blog post for the History News Network (HNN) on the historical roots of current U.S. health care debates. She addresses the topic as the author of Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, June 2015). Professor Chapin also has written a longer discussion of her book and the history of U.S. health care on the blog, "The Plot: Politics Decoded."     Her research interests include political, economic, and business history with a focus on the history of capitalism. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University , working on a project on the history of capitalism with Louis Galambos and Angus Burgin . Professor Chapin was a member of the Business History Conference's Doctoral Colloquium in 2009; as a graduate student at the University of Vir...

The Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) at the University of Minnesota announces the availability of the Gartner Group Records (CBI 228). The 57 linear feet of materials was donated by Sarah and Gideon Gartner in 2010 and 2014. The collection documents a major information technology consultancy during the years 1981 to 2000. These records reflect the Gartner Group's role as a leading information technology research company, including correspondence, research files, technology research publications, published reports, client workshops and conferences, and documentation regarding information gathering and reporting.  Companies represented include International Business Machines and many others. The records must be consulted onsite. A detailed finding guide may be found at http://purl.umn.edu/202668 . CBI makes available modest travel-to-collection support each year; the next application deadline is January 15, 2016 .     For more information about the many other holding...

During the academic years 2016-17 and 2017-18, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University will focus on the topic of “Risk and Fortune.” According to the website: Notions of risk have been important to human societies for centuries. Soothsaying, insurance, medical prognostication, financial investment, and gambling all contend with—or try to contain—possible losses. Conversely, good fortune has had its talismans and theorists throughout history. How have different cultures tried to tame chance, or comprehend its whims? To what degree have the practices of commerce relied upon, or alternatively reified, risk? Do technological systems generate hazards they are not capable of controlling? This two-year seminar will bring together scholars working on risk and fortune in historical societies around the world in all time periods, on topics including (but not restricted to) economics, science, religion, industry, statistics, and agriculture. More ab...

Virginia Magazine has posted a large sampling of twentieth-century advertisements from vintage issues of the magazine, each with a short commentary by University of Virginia history professor and BackStory [ with the American History Guys ] co-host Brian Balogh . As the website notes, "As much as these ads tell us about the products they advertise, they also reflect cultural anxieties about war, money and gender roles." The ads are divided by topic ("Men," "Women," "Technology," "Cigarettes," and "Curiosities") and by time period.     The site also includes a link to BackStory 's program on "Advertising in America."

Many archives now have at least one blog, often used  to present snippets of interesting research that feature the institution's holdings. Some time ago, we highlighted the Hagley's "Stories from the Stacks," a podcast in which scholars discuss their research in light of materials found in the Hagley archives. Another blog of interest is Conversant, the blog of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts. Recently Dan Du served as a guest blogger for Conversant, writing about "A Tea Talk: Discovering the History of American Tea Business at the Phillips Library." Dan Du is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, working on her dissertation, “This World in a Teacup: Chinese-American Tea Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” which examines a century-long commercial and cultural interaction between Chinese and Americans through the lens of tea.     Other business history-related posts from Conversant include "Land Disputes i...

In June, the Associated Press (AP) launched a YouTube channel of its archival collection, at the same time posting the British Movietone collection. According to the AP press release , The two channels will act as a view-on-demand visual encyclopedia, offering a unique perspective on the most significant moments of modern history. Available for all to explore, the channels will also be powerful educational tools and a source of inspiration for history enthusiasts and documentary filmmakers. The YouTube channels will include more than 550,000 video stories dating from 1895 to the present day.   The two collections together bring more than a million minutes of digitized film footage to YouTube, and the channels will be continually refreshed with up-to-date contemporary footage. Last year, U.K. newsreel archive company British Pathé uploaded its entire 100-year library of 85,000 historic films in high definition to YouTube, comprising some 3,500 hours of footage.

After a successful off-Broadway run at the Public Theater, Hamilton: An American Musical officially opened on Broadway earlier this month at the Richard Rodgers Theater. In a perhaps unlikely bit of artistic imagining, writer and lead actor Lin-Manuel Miranda has crafted a hip-hop musical depicting the life of Alexander Hamilton in which most of the actors in starring roles are black or Hispanic. The playbill from the Public Theater version asks, "Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?" Miranda has said he became interested in Hamilton after reading Ron Chernow's 2004 biography.     The play has won the enthusiastic approval of both historians and theater critics. It has been discussed twice on the early American history blog, "The Junto": first by Benjamin Carp in its off-Broadway incarnation and again by Christopher Minty , who attended the Broadway version. It won a rave review from Ben Brantley of the New York Times . Christopher Minty writes, b...

The Rice University Humanities Research Center and the Department of History are sponsoring a conference, " Atlantic Environments and the American South ," to take place at Rice on February 5-6, 2016. This conference will explore the ways in which the myriad flows of peoples, commodities, and ideas interacted with the environments of the greater Atlantic basin as a result of the increasingly close relationship between the Americas, Africa, and Europe. . . . By looking at how cotton, sugar, tobacco, rice and a host of other commodities moved between the southern United States and the larger Atlantic world this conference will be primarily concerned with how people altered, interacted with, and thought about the environments of the South and the Atlantic.  According to the call for papers , possible topics include: Commodity flows Production/consumption networks Ideas of the environment Local/regional/national/international scales Nation building Migration Ensla...

Volume 16, no. 3 of Enterprise & Society, published by the Business History Conference, has just been mailed. The issue ranges widely, both temporally and geographically; the table of contents includes: Caroline Jack , "Fun and Facts about American Business: Economic Education and Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series" Niklas Jensen-Eriksen and Jari Ojala , "Tackling Market Failure or Building a Cartel? Creation of an Investment Regulation System in Finnish Forest Industries" Martin Eriksson , "A Golden Combination: The Formation of Monetary Policy in Sweden after World War I" Talia Pfefferman and David De Vries , "Gendering Access to Credit: Business Legitimacy in Mandate Palestine" Richard Goldthwaite , "The Practice and Culture of Accounting in Renaissance Florence" Michael Aldous , "Avoiding Negligence and Profusion: The Failure of the Joint-Stock Form in the Anglo-Indian Tea Trade, 1840–1870...

The Society of Automotive Historians is seeking proposals for papers to be presented at its Eleventh Biennial Automotive History Conference to be held in Cleveland, Ohio, April 14-16, 2016. The conference theme is "Automotive History: Beginnings and New Beginnings." According to the call for papers, the meeting will focus on the first steps of the nascent motor industry and the later worldwide assimilation of the motor vehicle as a national icon seen in contrast to the revolutionary events of the early twentieth century. Cleveland has been chosen as conference venue because of its important role in the development of the American industry. Papers may address the beginnings of the automotive industry, the role of independent foundries, machine shops and carriage builders enabling the rapid growth of thinly-financed manufacturers followed by the early consolidation of the industry into a small number of major producers and their efforts to secure control of equipment ...

The 22nd Annual Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture ( OIEAHC ) Conference will convene in Worcester, Massachusetts, on June 23–26, 2016. Panels and plenaries will be held at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and additional events will take place at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). The program committee welcomes proposals considering all aspects of early American history broadly conceived. Inspired by the area’s indigenous history and the city’s manufacturing past, proposals dealing with “Native American Transformations” and “Early America at Work” are particularly encouraged.      Proposals must be received electronically no later than September 15, 2015 . For further submission details, please see the full call for papers .

Vicki Howard discusses her new book , From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (University of Pennsylvania Press) with Ronald Sklar at "The Modern." She can also be heard discussing the book in this podcast on "Inside Charlottesville." "Who Makes Cents" and Dissent magazine's "Belabored" podcast join forces to discuss the history of capitalism. The Historical Mapping Atlas of Ireland has just been relaunched; the data contained within the on-line maps include Irish population change data for every decade between 1841 and 2002 and Irish famine data on population density, agriculture, and housing between 1841 and 1851. The Imperial and Global Forum, the blog of the Centre for Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter, published a post by Jamie Martin of Harvard University that received a good deal of cross-posting and comment: "The Colonial Origins of the Greek Bailout." ...