Items of interest from around the web:
The corporate archives of Woolworth's UK have been donated to the University of Reading Archives at the University's Museum of English Rural Life (MERL). Following preservation work and cataloguing, the collection will soon be accessible to researchers.
The 99% Invisible website recently featured an article on "Machines for Living In: How Technology Shaped a Century of Interior Design."
The Harvard Business Review has posted "When America Was Most Innovative and Why," by Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, and Tom Nicholas.
In other HBS faculty news, there is an interesting interview in the Harvard Gazette with David Moss about his new book, Democracy: A Case Study (Harvard University Press), which uses the case method to chart the development of American democracy; many of the nineteen cases relate directly to business history.
And "Live Mint" has an interview with Geoffrey Jones of HBS on "a second wave of deglobalization."
Further on globalization, Jeremy Adelman of Princeton University has an extended essay on "Aeon" about the historiography and future of global history: "What is global history now?
Two posts of interest from "The Conversation": "Women were to blame for the south sea bubble--according to men," by Anne Murphy; and "No, the black death did not create more jobs for women," by Jane Humphreys.
The EHS blog, "The Long Run," has accumulated a number of interesting essays.
Heidi Tworek, Richard John, Michael Stamm, and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb were among the participants at the recent Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference held at New York University. Details of the closing panel, featuring Tworek, John, Stamm, and Silberstein-Loeb, are highlighted here; Stamm also presented the keynote speech.
Richard John also spoke recently to the Forbes staff about the history of American capitalism. He has posted the slides from that talk online.
The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy has announced that Laura Phillips Sawyer of the Harvard Business School has been selected to receive the 2016 Glenn Sonnedecker Prize for her article, “California Fair Trade: Antitrust and the Politics of 'Fairness' in U.S. Competition Policy” (Business History Review, 2015). The Sonnedecker Prize is awarded annually for the best original article published on the history of some facet of pharmacy practice or pharmacy education in the United States.
Nancy Tomes, professor at Stony Brook University, is one of the winners of the Bancroft Prize for Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients Into Consumers (University of North Carolina Press), which examines the origins of the notion that patients should “shop” for health care.
The University of Toronto Press Journals blog has published an interview with Nicole St-Onge about her essay " 'He was neither a soldier nor a slave: he was under the control of no man': Kahnawake Mohawks in the Northwest Fur Trade, 1790-1850," which appeared in the Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes D’Histoire in 2016; the article is available here ungated, for a very limited time.
Liz Daly's "Culture Digest" looks at the new exhibit at the Museum of American Finance, "For the Love of Money: Blacks on US Currency"; a brief online view of the exhibit is here.
Andrew Hartman of Illinois State University posted the reading list for his "History of Capitalism" course on the U.S. Intellectual History blog; see also the comments offering additions.
The Panorama, the blog for the Journal of the Early Republic, published for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), has two essays of particular interest: one by John Lauritz Larson, on "On Cat's Paws: Teaching the Emergence of Capitalism in American History," and another by Ellen Hartigan O'Connor, on "Teaching Gender's Value.":
An exhibition of interest at the Musee du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac in Paris: "L'Afrique des Routes," which offers a new approach to the role of the African continent in international trade and cultural exchanges through more than 350 objects (scroll down to see some illustrations). A brief overview in English is here; the accompanying exhibition catalog is here.