The Exchange

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminars and Institutes  "focus on the study and teaching of significant texts and other resources; provide models of excellent scholarship and teaching; contribute to the intellectual growth of the participants; and build lasting communities of inquiry." The call for proposals for summer 2019 is now open. According to the website, "a Seminar provides an intimate and focused environment in which sixteen participants study a specific humanities topic under the guidance of one or two established scholars"; an Institute "allows twenty-five to thirty-six participants to pursue an intensive program of study under a team of scholarly experts."  Programs are designed for either K-12 educators or college and university faculty.     The proposal deadline for Summer 2019 projects is February 22, 2018 . Full information, including application instructions and program guidelines, is available on the NEH Seminar...

The 13th annual "Appalachian Spring" Conference in World History and Economics will take place on April 14-15, 2018, on Appalachian State University’s campus in Boone, North Carolina. This conference is an interdisciplinary meeting aimed at bringing together scholars from Appalachian State University (Boone, NC) and scholars from other universities in North Carolina, the surrounding states, and abroad. This year’s guest speaker will be Dr. Stephen Broadberry, Professor of Economic History and Research Fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford University. The conference will also feature several panels with scholarly papers, divided among different topical themes, including an undergraduate/graduate panel. This year’s theme will be "Convergence and Divergence in World History."       Paper or panel proposals do not have to be directly tied to the conference theme, although papers fitting with the theme will be given special consideration. Graduate students are welcome...

For those of you celebrating Christmas today, very best wishes from The Exchange. As a small gift, we provide the following history-related sites of interest: From The Smithsonian online, a brief history of the Christmas card  and a sampling of holiday cards from Smithsonian collections; the New-York Historical Society blog  details the influence of Louis Prang on the American Christmas card market. And the Postal Museum has an interesting essay about "Holiday Parcels in World War I" ; and for collectors, a history of the art of Christmas stamps ;  Anne L. Murphy writes about Christmas and New Year's bonuses for 18th-century bankers This archive provides over 25,000 pages of vintage Christmas catalogs from Sears, Lord & Taylor, Spiegel, Montgomery Ward, and several others. The Hagley Vault features a series of Christmas-related materials  from its holdings. Ellen Caldwell explains "How Charles Dickens Set the American Christmas Dinner Table" ...

As has become traditional, the 2018 Business History Conference meeting will be preceded by a series of  workshops  on Thursday, April 5. (For full program information, please see our previous post and the BHC meeting website.) The BHC-organized workshops for 2018 are: Publishing Business History , chaired by Albert Churella Teaching Capitalism , co-chaired by Jennifer Black and Eric Hintz Teaching through Adversity , chaired by Anne Murphy In addition to these three workshops, there will be two sponsored workshops: "Classroom Frontiers: Business History Course Development Workshop," sponsored by the Copenhagen Business School; and  "STS and Business History,"  organized by the Canadian Business History Association and the University of Toronto Techno-Science Research Unit. The latter is accepting abstracts from interested scholars, with a deadline of  January 23, 2018 .     Please check back soon for more detailed descriptions of the BHC wo...

The IEEE journal  Annals of the History of Computing invites submissions for a special issue titled “Governance in the History of Computing.” Edited by Gerardo Con Diaz (University of California, Davis), this special issue will showcase how formal and informal forms of governance (from law and policy to self-policing) have shaped the history of computing broadly conceived. According to the call for papers: I n recent years, scholars have developed a keen interest on the historical relationships between information technology and governance. Their work is revealing that computing and telecommunications technologies have been inseparable from the web of formal and informal forms of governance in which they are embedded. In the process they are showing how the study of law, policy, and regulation can shed new light on every major theme in the history of computing—from the design and commercialization of specific technologies, to the politics of their usage, representation, and disp...

The full program for the 2018 meeting of the Business History Conference, which will take place in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 5-7, has been posted on the BHC meeting website .      The theme of the meeting is "Money, Finance, and Capital." The Program Committee consists of David Sicilia (chair), University of Maryland; Christy Ford Chapin , University of Maryland-Baltimore County; Per Hansen , Copenhagen Business School; Naomi Lamoreaux , Yale University; Rory Miller , University of Liverpool; Julia C. Ott , New School for Social Research; and Mary O’Sullivan (BHC president), University of Geneva. Local arrangements have been overseen by Joshua Davis , University of Baltimore.      In addition to regular sessions, the meeting will feature the Krooss Prize Dissertation session; a plenary on "Baltimore in Business History," and two roundtable discussions: one on "Adventures in Financial Archives," and a second on "Teaching Financial History....

The Sixth Asian Historical Economics Conference (AHEC 2018) will be hosted by the Asia Global Institute and the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with the Asian Historical Economics Society , on September 21-22, 2018. The two-day conference will be held at Le Méridien Hotel in Hong Kong.      This meeting follows earlier conferences of the Asian Historical Economics Society in Venice (2008), Beijing (2010), Tokyo (2012), Istanbul (2014), and Seoul (2016). The conference aims to bring together researchers working on the economic history of all regions of Asia, as well as those comparing Asia with other regions. AHEC 2018 invites papers exploring various aspects of economic history. Participants in the AHEC are generally limited to holders of a Ph.D. and those currently in a doctoral program.      Interested scholars should submit an abstract (max. 1-page) together with paper(s) or session proposal(s) via th...

On March 2-3, 2018, professors Lee Alston, John Nye, and Barry Weingast will host a conference, sponsored by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, to consider the impact of Douglass North’s work on the discipline of economics: "The Life & Legacy of Douglass North." The conference, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of North's Nobel Prize in Economics, will be structured around five key periods in his career: 1) Cliometrics and Measurement; 2) Relative Prices, Property Rights, and Transaction Costs; 3) Institutions; 4) Belief and Cognition; and 5) Violence. Each theme will have a keynote lecture and a series of paper presentations.     Registration is now open. There is no registration fee, but attendees will be responsible for their own travel and lodging.

From Alexander Hamilton to the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the United States Treasury has faced wars, panics, and a rapidly changing American and global economy. To promote and preserve the history of this institution, the Treasury Historical Association (THA) invites essay submissions for the inaugural 1500 Penn Prize.      Named in honor of the location of the Treasury’s historic main building, the prize seeks to reward outstanding scholarship on the history and significance of the Treasury to American history—broadly conceived. The THA welcomes scholarly essays that cover any period of American history, as well as any aspect of the Treasury’s past, including studies of policies, politics, architecture, people, and culture. Essays will be judged by a panel of historians and Treasury experts.      The winner of this contest will receive a $250 honorarium as well as an invitation to speak at the THA’s Noontime Lecture Series. The THA will cover travel ...

At its 2018 annual meeting, the AHA will present a small number of  late-breaking sessions , which will explore either major, late-breaking controversies within the discipline or the relevance of history and historical thinking to public policy and culture related to current events.      Edward Balleisen, Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University, will be chairing such a session. on January 5, 3:30-5:00 p.m., in the Blue Room of the Omni Shoreham: “Revolt against Regulation in the Time of Trump: Historical Perspectives.”  The panel includes Sally Katzen, former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (in the Clinton Administration); Susan Dudley, former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (in the George W. Bush Administration); Cary Coglianese, Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and professor of political science, University of Pennsylvania; Nelson Lichtenstein, Distinguished Professor o...

A workshop on "Politics and State Finance in the Peripheries of the Global Economy in Historical Perspective" will take place at University College London on June 6-7, 2018. Keynote speakers will be Tim Besley (London School of Economics) and Larry Neal (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). The deadline for paper submissions is December 15, 2017 . According to the organizers, the workshop is open to papers on any time range which focus on peripheries of Europe, Asia and Africa. . . . Proposed papers inter alia will explore topics of fiscal policy, long-term patterns of taxation and government spending, political economy of domestic/foreign debt and defaults, persistence and convergence of fiscal regimes, and the links between global finance and domestic politics. Interested participants are required submit a 500-word abstract and title together with their academic CV to history.debt@ucl.ac.uk . Participants will be invited to publish an extended abstract of their...

The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History , part of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, announces the availability of three grants for research travel to our collections: the Alvin Achenbaum travel grant, FOARE Fellowship for Outdoor Advertising Research, and the John Furr Fellowship for research in the J. Walter Thompson Co. Archives.        The John W. Hartman Center promotes the understanding of the social, cultural and historical influence of advertising and marketing through the collection of published and unpublished resources. Strengths of the collection include direct marketing and sales, outdoor advertising, women in the industry, trade industry association records, and the records of multiple advertising agencies and marketing firms.        Travel grants are available to faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, artists, and independent scholars with a rese...

The American Historical Association has announced the winners of its awards for 2017 in advance of the 2018 meeting in Washington, D.C. Among them are two distinguished BHC members: Roger Horowitz , director of the program on Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library and long-time secretary treasurer of the Business History Conference, has been awarded the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in the history of the Jewish diaspora for his book Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food (Columbia University Press, 2016). Patrick Fridenson , directeur d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and former BHC trustee and past-president, was awarded the Honorary Foreign Member Prize for a foreign scholar who is distinguished in his or her field and who has “notably aided the work of American historians in the scholar's country.” The awards will be presented at the AHA meeting in January.