Jane Humphries of the University of Oxford presented the Ellen McArthur Lectures at Cambridge this year. Her topic for the four-lecture series was "Eve Also Delved: Gendering Economic History"; synopses of the talks are available on the website.
A recent Paris Review posted an essay on "The Entrepreneurial Kafka," detailing a plan to make money by publishing "On the Cheap" travel guides.
Digital Commonwealth: Massachusetts Collections Online recently featured its collection of colorful circus posters. Many other curated collections can be accessed on the Digital Commonwealth website.
Cornell University has announced a major project, "Freedom on the Move," which will create "a database that digitizes, preserves, organizes, and enables analysis of all surviving runaway ads from the historical period of North American slavery.
The Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions recently held a conference (on April 15-16) on "Taking Stock of the State in Nineteenth-Century America." Participants included many members of the business history community, including Stephen Mihm, Julia Ott, Richard John, and Naomi Lamoreaux; a poster with the event schedule is available here.
The University of Maryland Library has a large selection of historic postcards online. The collection represents a small sampling of the approximately 20,000 postcards available in the National Trust for Historic Preservation Library Collection. The library will continue to add images to the collection.
Illustrator and writer Patrick Reynolds recently created a series of cartoons about black barbers based on Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom by Douglas Bristol of the University of Southern Mississippi.
Bill Rankin and Michael Ralph have created a map showing slaves for whom their owners purchased insurance before the Civil War; there is also a graph of the occupations of the insured and a link to the raw data, collected by Michael Ralph of NYU.
In honor of the April IRS income tax filing deadline in the United States, historian Robin Einhorn of the University of California Berkeley has written a brief history of the income tax for AHA Today.
A group has formed to investigate the history of apprenticeship in early modern Europe. The primary organizers are Patrick Wallis of the London School of Economics and Ruben Schalk of the University of Utrecht. The next workshop in the series will occur on July 3-4, 2016, and will feature Joel Mokyr speaking on "Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in the Pre-Industrial Economy."
Long-time BHC member Edwin J. Perkins was featured in a recent American Historical Association "Member Spotlight." Perkins is retired, an emeritus professor at the University of Southern California.
The National Records of Scotland, in collaboration with the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Business History in Scotland (CBHS), is hosting a one-day conference on the theme of using digital records for business history research. The conference will be held in Edinburgh on May 9, 2016.
"Goin' North: Stories from the First Great Migration to Philadelphia" is an oral history website created by students in Janneken Smucker and Charles Hardy's course at West Chester University. For full details on the evolution and sources for the website, please see the "About" section.
The "Playing with History" physical exhibit at Oxford's Weston Library is highlighted in a fascinating look at vintage board games that focused on historical events such as women's suffrage, the Boer and Crimean wars, and trade in the British Empire.
The Atlantic published an essay by Ilana E. Strauss calling into question the existence of barter economies, "The Myth of the Barter Economy."
The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, located in West London, and its founder Robert Opie were featured recently in The Guardian.