The Exchange

The 9th edition of the EBHA ( European Business History Association ) Summer School will take place in Ancona (Italy) from Monday, September 4, to Saturday, September 9, 2017. The school aims at providing doctoral students with an overview of relevant research results and of innovative tools and methodologies in the field of Business History. It is organized jointly by the European Business History Association (EBHA), the Università Politecnica delle Marche, and the Italian Association for Business History (ASSI). Students will be accommodated in the beautiful town of Ancona debating and discussing their research with leading international scholars.      The title of the school will be "Business History: Debates, Challenges and Opportunities." The school will focus on theoretical, methodological and practical issues which are of relevance for advanced research in business history. The main aim of the school is to provide students with a full understanding of the newest t...

The BHC's Liaison Committee (Alexia Yates, Vicki Howard, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, and Rowena Olegario) would like to remind everyone of the annual BHC-sponsored luncheon at the upcoming meeting of the American Historical Association in Denver . Those attending the conference who would like to take part in the lunch should purchase a ticket ($40.00) as part of the registration process.     We have another fantastic lineup this year to address a topic that cuts across multiple historical fields. The details are: "A New Materialism? The Economic and Beyond" Friday, January 6, 2017: 12:00-1:30 p.m. Mile High Ballroom 1F (Colorado Convention Center, Ballroom Level)  Speakers: Fahad Bishara, University of Virginia Christine Rosen, University of California, Berkeley Robyn d'Avignon, New York University Geoff Eley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Chair: Kenneth J. Lipartito, Florida International University  Please come along for what promises to be a l...

Last June, The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University presented a symposium on "Science & Capitalism: Entangled Histories." The description and program are available here ; papers will be published in a special issue of Osiris in 2018. The recipients of the 2016 Wadsworth Prize of the Business Archives Council are Richard Roberts and David Kynsaton for The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC . On "Pro-Market," the blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, Richard John has an extended discussion of his current research in an interview entitled "When Did Americans Stop Being Antimonopoly?" Over 75 German historians have recently protested the sudden firing of Manfred Grieger, the historian and archivist for Volkswagen who was instrumental in allowing access to the company's archives and in detailing its practices during the Second World War. The New York Times coverage, featu...

The Early American History blog The Junto has posted a multi-part examination of the recent book edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016).  The book's table of contents, which includes essays by--among many others--Edward Baptist, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua Rothman, Kathryn Boodry,  and John Majewski, is available here . The volume is the product of a 2011 conference organized jointly by Harvard and Brown universities. The forum essays are: Tom Cutterham, "Forum Introduction" Casey Schmitt, "The Global and the Hemispheric" Justin Leroy, "Commodities and Agents in the History of Slavery" Christy Clark-Pujara, "Slave Economies of the U.S. North"   Kevin Waite, "Slavery's Civil War?"

Hosted by the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand (EHSANZ), the annual  Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History (APEBH) Conference will be held on February 9-11, 2017, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). The theme will be "Current Trends in Economic and Business History Research." According to the call for papers , Researchers across a broad range of disciplines are warmly welcomed. Early career researchers are encouraged to participate. The conference organisers are also particularly interested in attracting papers that examine topics in the context of the Asia-Pacific region and papers that provide an international comparative perspective, in particular for settler-economies like Australia and New Zealand. The conference looks for new research from a number of perspectives, including those of the cliometrician, the business historian, the applied economist, as well as the social historian. There is ample scope for new interp...

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), in collaboration with the Minnesota Digital Library, has mounted an on-line exhibit on "Quack Cures and Self-Remedies: Patent Medicine." As the introduction says, "The story of patent medicine is multi-layered. It is about the phenomenon of Americans self-medicating with opiates, alcohol, and herbal supplements, as well as women’s health and healthcare options. It follows the evolution of advertising in America and the rise of chromolithography printing techniques and newspaper advertisements." The well-illustrated site contains brief essays on various aspects of the role of patent medicines in American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.     The DPLA itself is the home of an ever-growing list of on-line exhibits of interest, including the shoe industry in Massachusetts, the transcontinental railroad, the Gold Rush, and many more.

For nearly two decades, Gerard Koot , professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (emeritus since 2010), taught NEH Summer Seminars--first on the Industrial Revolution in Britain , and, more recently, on "The Dutch Republic and Britain: The Making of a European World Economy." In the course of those efforts, Koot compiled websites for the projects that contain a wealth of useful materials. The sites include essays by Koot on specific topics, illustrations, bibliographies, and links to primary sources. Also included are students' papers for all the years of the Seminar.     Because these NEH summer seminars are directed at K-12 teachers, most of the materials are designed to be useful for teaching.      

The next annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) will be held on July 20-23, 2017, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to the call for papers : The Program Committee invites proposals for sessions and papers exploring all aspects of the history and culture of the early American republic, together with its northern and southern borderlands and transnational connections, c. 1776-1861. We particularly seek: New scholarship in the history of African Americans, Native Americans, the carceral state, gender, and sexuality Work informed by new methodologies and approaches Participants from outside traditional boundaries of the field (for example, the Parks Service) Submissions focusing on pedagogy, public history, and digital humanities. We also welcome panels that foster audience participation, feature pre-circulated papers, or assess the state of a given field. Scholars who desire to participate in non-traditional sessions (such a...

The 2017 Doctoral Colloquium in Business History will be held in conjunction with the annual meeting. The workshop, funded by Cambridge University Press, will take place in Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday, March 29, and Thursday, March 30, 2017. Typically limited to ten students, the colloquium is open to early-stage doctoral candidates pursuing dissertation research within the broad field of business history, from any relevant discipline. Participants work intensively with a distinguished group of BHC-affiliated scholars (including at least two BHC officers), discussing dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and career trajectories.        Applications are due by November 15, 2016 , via email to bhc@hagley.org and should include: a statement of interest; CV; preliminary or final dissertation prospectus (10-15 pages); and a letter of support from the dissertation supervisor (or prospective supervisor). Questions about...

Readers may not be aware of a relatively new service at H-Net, made possible by the reorganization of the long-standing humanities internet presence into H-Net Commons. The H-Net Book Channel offers a wide variety of information about new books in nearly every humanities field; one user describes it as "a book discovery service." In addition to announcements of new books, the site contains a growing number of short historiographical essays, pieces connecting headlines to deeper academic research, and ideas for ways to incorporate recent publications into introductory and survey courses.      Though not perfect (a quick check of "Economic History" books, for example, finds many titles that are, at best, peripheral to that field, and titles are duplicated if published in more than one format initially), the site is now importing the catalogues of over a hundred publishers, making it a comprehensive source. Each title is provided with links to its WorldCat and...

A partial list of books of interest published or forthcoming in paperback from September through December (and a few we missed): Richard Adelstein , The Rise of Planning in Industrial America, 1865-1914 (Routledge, December 2016 [2012]) Glenn J. Ames , Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade (Northern Illinois University Press, August 2016 [1996]) Edward E. Baptist , The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, October 2016 [2014]) Nancy Cox , The Complete Tradesman: A  Study of Retailing, 1550-1820 (Routledge, August 2016 [2000]) Barry Eichengreen , Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses--and Misuses--of History (Oxford University Press, October 2016 [2015]) Robert E. Forrester , British Mail Steamers to South America, 1851-1965: A History of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and Royal Mail Lines (Routledge, September 2016 [2014]) Robert E. Gallamore and John...

The Knowledge and Library Services Division at Harvard Business School has produced an interesting web project that provides insight into the influence of Benjamin Franklin's 1758 essay, The Way to Wealth . According to the website, The Way to Wealth Editions project is directed by Professor Sophus A. Reinert (Harvard Business School) and based on a bibliography of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth compiled by Kenneth E. Carpenter. It seeks to provide students and scholars with an array of unique research tools and contextual essays for understanding the influence and impact of Franklin's seminal essay on work ethic and frugality. The site features a searchable, and growing database of 1000+ editions of The Way to Wealth , special full-text editions to analyze and compare, timeline-maps that illustrate the work's publication history and geographic influence, and a series of interactive essays providing researchers with new insights into the work and its author. R...