The Exchange

The Newberry Library has organized hundreds of items among its large holdings into "Collections for the Classroom." Materials are divided by topic (for example, "Commodities and the Transformation of the American Landscape"; "The New Deal in Chicago and the Midwest"), but items may also be browsed alphabetically and can be sorted by date, author, or title. Users can log in to create their own lesson plans by assembling Newberry materials of their choosing; the results will be stored as a unique URL.      For a full list of the Newberry's many online exhibits and topical digital publications, please see the Newberry website .

The 2018 Association of Business Historians (ABH) annual conference will be held on June 29-30, 2018, at the Open University Business School in Milton Keynes. The conference theme is "Pluralistic Perspectives of Business History: Gender, Class, Ethnicity, Religion." The conference "aims to explore the impact of gender, social class, ethnicity, and religion on business success, fraud, funding, financial markets, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility."     The program committee will consider both individual papers and entire panels. Individual paper proposals should include a one-page (up to 300-word) abstract and one-page curriculum vitae (CV). Panel proposals should include a cover letter stating the rationale for the panel and the name of its contact person; one-page (300 word) abstract and author’s CV for each paper; and a list of preferred panel chairs and commentators with contact information. The deadline for submissions is January 15,...

The European Association for Banking and Financial History (EABH) is sponsoring a one-day workshop at the Westin Zagreb Hotel in Zagreb, Croatia, on November 10, 2017, on "The Data Dilemma: A Risk or an Asset?" According to the organizers: The amount of data about the finance sector is growing exponentially and storing it is becoming easier. Businesses are excited about the commercial possibilities of ‘Big Data’; academics are relishing the research potential of deep data archives and regulators are hoping for a fuller view of systemic risk and stability. Will it all turn out well though? The current reality of massive data stores is often no more than massive cost and complexity. The workshop will explore how we got here with data and where we go next.  The program is available on the EABH website, and registration information is here . The workshop will run in parallel to the international conference "INFuture 2017: Integrating ICT in Society," meeting i...

The latest issue of the online journal Common-Place (issue 17, no. 4) has two pieces of direct interest to business historians. First, in "The Business of Building Books," Paul Erickson explores the value of thinking about books "as objects that were processed, stored, and packaged by industrialists," and that could be used "as payments to workers who labored on their manufacture."     In the book review section, Courtney Fullilove examines Gergely Baics, Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy of Geography and Food in New York, 1790-1860 , in an essay entitled "Slaughterhouse Rules: The Deregulation of Food Markets in Antebellum New York."

The 43rd Economic and Business History Society (EBHS) Annual Conference will be held at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, on May 30-June 2, 2018. The general theme is "Early Modern Origins of Growth and Business." However, proposals for presentations on any aspect of ancient to recent economic, social or business history are welcome, as are proposals for whole panels. Submissions from graduate students and non-academic affiliates are encouraged.     Proposals should include an abstract of no more than 500 words and contact details. The deadline for submission of proposals is February 15, 2018 . Proposals may be submitted through the EBHS website at www.ebhsoc.org (or by email to ebhs2018@ebhsoc.org ). Please consult the complete call for papers for more details about the meeting and submission procedures.     Questions should be addressed to Program Chair Olli Turunen, oturunen@wisc.edu , or EBHS 2018 President Jari Eloranta, elorantaj@appstate.edu ....

The journal Management and Organizational History has issued a call for papers for a special issue on "Making Managers." Guest editors are Rolv Petter Amdam, Mathias Kipping, and Jacqueline McGlade. They state: The issue intends to fill an important gap in the current literature on the history of management education, which has largely been centered on organizational development narratives, i.e. the rise of business schools, the global spread of the American model, business-based academic disciplines, etc. We therefore invite papers that to chronicle the actual preparation of managers in all types, venues and forms; address questions and perspectives that have not been addressed; and cover geographical areas or industries and activities that are not in focus in the extant literature. For a much fuller explanation of possible topics and the submission process, please see the journal website . The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2018 .

Business History Explorer (BHE) is a bibliography covering the history of UK businesses and the industries to which they belong. At the end of 2016 it contained  c 45,000 entries. Its prime purpose is to assist researchers in locating historical information about specific businesses. The bibliography includes monographs, periodical articles, theses, chapters in multi-author works, unpublished works, and selected product and employment literature. The database is being continuously updated in order to include new publications and to plug gaps in the existing constituency. According to the project website, "Many gaps remain in periodical article coverage and priority is being given in 2017 to addressing this."     One can search the database to get a sense of the contents without charge, but viewing the results returned requires payment of an annual fee, substantially discounted for BAC members and affiliates.        The BHE is the su...

News about and by historians of business continues to pop up in the general media. [Note that some of these links may lead to material that is gated, but readers with access to university or public libraries should be able to gain entry.] In an opinion piece in the wake of the Google employee memo about gender in the industry, Marie Hicks drew on her recent research to write "Women were foundational to the field of computing" for the Washington Post . Marc Levinson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on "Can Amazon Be the Next Apple?" Josh Lauer appeared on NPR's Marketplace, discussing his new book, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America . An essay on the Bank of England blog on Britain's early efforts to finance the First World War , written by Michael Anson, Norma Cohen, Alastair Owens and Daniel Todman, received widespread coverage in the UK press; see, for example, the Financial Times . Ed Balle...

The Institut historique allemand in Paris is holding a two-day workshop on March 19-20, 2018, on the subject "Contextualizing Bankruptcy: Publicity, Space and Time (Europe, 17th to 19th c.)." The organizers [Natacha Coquery (LARHRA, Lyon 2, IUF); Jürgen Finger (DHI Paris); Mark Sven Hengerer (LMU Munich)] write in their call for papers: Although bankruptcy is a rather exceptional situation in the life of a merchant, it has explanatory power for routines of economic stakeholders. Considering the long, non-uniform and unsteady transition from merchant capitalism to industrial and financial capitalism, we suggest to start a dialog between modernistes and contemporanéistes . The workshop focuses on the various forms of contextualizing business failure and puts forward three major research axes: Covering and uncovering/secrecy and publicity; economic space and area of jurisdiction; temporal narratives of (in)solvency. Those interested in presenting should send an abstract of...

A number of history organizations and groups now publish active and informative blogs, which often include material of interest to business and economic historians. A (far from comprehensive) sampling: American Antiquarian Society: Past Is Present American Historical Association: AHA Today Centre for Imperial and Global History, Exeter: Imperial & Global Forum    Economic History Society: The Long Run Global Urban History Hagley Library and Museum: Research and Collection News Legal History Blog   National Museum of American History, O Say Can You See? (filtered for business history) New-York Historical Society: From the Stacks   Organization of American Historians: Process Organizational History Network Society for Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR): The Panorama The Junto (early Americanists) Urban History Association: The Metropole  In addition, several individual historians manage blogs of interest: Ed Ayers, et al., Bunk:...

On November 10, 2017, the Hagley Museum and Library will offer a conference on "Hidden Capitalism: Beyond, Below, and Outside the Visible Market." The conference was initiated by Lisa Jacobson (UC Santa Barbara) and Ken Lipartito (Florida International University); they were joined on the program committee by Roger Horowitz (Hagley Museum and Library) and Wendy Woloson (Rutgers University). Session titles are: "Business in the shadows"; "Liminal spaces and global order";"Capitalisms in collision"; and "Regulating alternative markets."     For additional information, please contact Carol Lockman at clockman@hagley.org .