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Over the Counter: Issue No. 22

Jeffrey Sturchio, a historian of the pharmaceutical industry, is featured in the American Historical Association's Member's Spotlight for January 14.

Also from the AHA, an essay by Amanda Ciafone on Coca Cola and its influence on Atlanta (in honor of the Association's meeting in that city)

Among the many tributes on the passing of David Bowie, one concerns his role in the market: "David Bowie: The Man Who Sold Royalties and Brought Music to Bonds," from Bloomberg Business.

And among the deluge of writing during the recent lottery excitement, a few stories focused on history: "Lottery Mania in Colonial America," from the American Numismatic Society, and "Lottery Fever: A Brief History of American Lotteries," by Diana Williams at Backstory.

The Page 99 Test published a discussion by Bruce Baker and Barbara Hahn of their recent book, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, professor of business history and bank management at Bangor Business School, was awarded the prestigious Premio al Merito Profesional (Professional Merit Award) by the alumni association of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).

The Rural Diary Archive at the University of Guelph features over 130 Ontario diarists from 1800 to 1960, with more to come; project director Catharine Wilson describes the project here.

Out-of-copyright materials in NYPL Digital Collections are now available as high-resolution downloads. For an explanation and more details, see the Library's blog post, "Free for All: NYPL Enhances Public Domain Collections For Sharing and Reuse."

Two programs of interest:
FEEGI (Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction) Conference (where the keynote address will be given by Philip Stern of Duke University); and "Atlantic Environments and the American South"

Carl Robert Keyes of Assumption College has introduced the Adverts250 Project, which "explores the history of advertising in eighteenth-century America. It features a daily . . . image of an advertisement published in a colonial newspaper 250 years ago that week. Brief commentary accompanies each advertisement." Occasional longer commentaries also appear.

From "La vie des idées" [in French], "Le retour de l’histoire économique?" by Guillaume Calafat and Éric Monnet

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum has made available texts from FDR's Master Speech File, linked to audio files when available. The collection includes over 46,000 pages of drafts, reading copies, and transcripts created throughout FDR's political career.

Three new sites with information relevant to African American business history:
The Schomburg Center has digitized the "Negro Travelers' Green Book" series; an article about these books, which advised black American travelers about where they would be welcome, is available here. Another is posted in the Daily Beast. The University of South Carolina has also prepared a digital map of places listed in the spring 1956 edition of the Green Book.
The University of Delaware Library has launched "Colored Conventions: Bringing Nineteenth-Century Black Organizing to Life." For examples relevant to business historians, see "Black Wealth and the 1843 National Colored Convention" and an article by Sarah Patterson based on the website in the recent issue of Common-Place, "Black Women, Black Data and Colored Conventions."
And from The Atlantic, "The Story of Wall Street's First Black Millionaire."
From Lisa Haney in The Baffler, a not entirely laudatory look at "Better Management Through Belles-Lettres," about the uses of literature in business schools.

The initial release of "American Panorama," a historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century," is now on-line; the project, at the University of Richmond, is ongoing.

Three links relating to the business of games, physical and digital:
An article on Monopoly in honor of its 80th birthday, and one on how board games taught Americans to shop, both from the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian; from Fast Company, "The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge."

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