The Exchange

The Accounting History Review Annual Conference will take place at Edge Hill University Business School on September 10-11, 2019.  According to the organizers, This conference will build on recent scholarship in Accounting History Review that demonstrates an important and impressive shift from accounting history to accounting in history – from accounting historians to historians who examine multi-faceted social and institutional contexts through an accounting lens. . . . Theoretical, empirical and review papers are welcomed in all areas of accounting history. We encourage studies that move beyond disciplinary boundaries and engage with historians in other research areas.  The conference format will include approximately 40 minutes for presentation and discussion in order to provide worthwhile feedback for presenters.       Those wishing to offer papers to be considered for presentation at the conference should submit an extended abstract of their paper ...

A few recent articles of interest to business and economic historians published in blogs: On the American Philosophical Society blog, Cynthia Heider writes about "Indenture Mining: Making Pre-Industrial Tradeswomen Visible" (part 1, with part 2 to come shortly) A recent post on the Library of Congress's "Inside Adams" blog discusses the history of quantitative graphics in "Historical Business & Economics Charts and Graphs." On the National Archives blog "The Text Message," Elise Fariello writes at length about the usefulness of "Tax Assessment Lists of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries." On the "Organizational History Network," Peter Miskell recaps his ABH talk on "The Content & Practice of Business History" An early July installment of JSTOR Daily delves into  "The Massive Fight over Sunday Mail," using a 1990 Richard R. John article as its source. On SHEAR's "Panor...

A symposium to commemorate the bicentennial of the opening of the National (or Cumberland) Road from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia) will be held at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania, on October 27, 2018. To recognize the National Road's significance and legacy, this symposium will look beyond the National Road to examine the larger role of internal improvements and transportation in United States history. Academic and public historians, graduate and undergraduate students, and independent scholars are invited to submit proposals for presentations or papers focused on the National Road, internal improvements, and United States transportation history. Alternate session formats, including roundtable discussions, film viewings, and hands-on programs, will also be considered.      Proposals should include a 250- to 500-word abstract for the presentation and a CV/résumé. Please send all submissions to Hilary_Mille...

Marc Levinson and Susan Aaronson at the U.S. Trade Policy Congressional Briefing In our last "Business Historians in the News," we mentioned the June congressional briefing organized by the National History Center on the history of U.S. trade policy, which featured as speakers Susan Aaronson, George Washington University, and Alfred Eckes, Jr., Ohio University; Marc Levinson of the Congressional Research Service moderated. Perspectives Daily , the successor to AHA Today , has just published a synopsis of and commentary on the event written by Dane Kennedy.     Readers can also now see a video of the briefing on C-Span's American History TV ; a written summary is available here .

The Howard S. Marks chair of economic history in the history department at the University of Pennsylvania invites applications for a postdoctoral fellow for the 2018-19 year (12 months), preferred start date between September 1 and October 30, 2018. The position is open to highly qualified researchers who received their Ph.D. in history, economics, or political science no more than two years prior to the start of the appointment or are about to receive it; applicants must conduct research in any field of economic history. The fellowship involves providing administrative assistance to the activities of the chair (organization of two workshops), including editorial work for the journal Capitalism and History .     For the full announcement and application procedures, please see the position announcement on the University of Pennsylvania website. The application deadline is August 1, 2018 . Questions may be directed to Marc Flandreau at mfl@sas.upenn.edu . N.B.: Applicants with...

The 25th Omohundro Institute annual conference will take place at the University of Pittsburgh on June 13-16, 2019. The program committee invites papers that consider the relationship between the local and the global in shaping a vast early American history. Inspired by the role that local conflicts in the Pittsburgh area played in triggering the global Seven Years’ War, we particularly welcome proposals that consider the relevance of the global turn in early American history and that engage critically with geographically-bounded frames of reference (be they regional, continental, hemispheric, oceanic, or global). We further encourage proposals that creatively recognize the importance of typically marginalized subjects in the interplay between local and global events, including, but not limited to, new research on race, ethnicity, slavery, gender, sexuality, class, Native studies, environmental studies, and free and coerced labor and migration.  For complete information on ty...

The 22nd Annual Congress of the European Business History Association (EBHA) will meet on September 6-8, 2018, in Ancona, Italy; the theme will be "The Firm and the Sea: Chains, Flows and Connections." The preliminary program has now been posted, and presenters have begun to upload their papers. In addition to the many regular sessions, the program includes a dissertation prize session as well as a keynote speech by Gelina Harlaftis on "The Relation to the Sea: Maritime Business in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea."     For logistical details about accommodation, venues, and registration, please consult the meeting website . Note that online registration (at a reduced rate) ends on July 30, 2018 .

A one-day graduate student conference on “The development of financial centres in Europe, 1300–1700” will be held at Queen’s College, Cambridge, on September 27, 2018, to honor the work of the late Peter Spufford . According to the call for papers : The aim of this conference is to bring together young scholars to reflect on state-of-art scholarship on this subject, and explore new hypotheses on the characters, inner dynamics and evolution of financial centres in Europe. The conference’s organization therefore invites submissions for presentations. . . . Papers directly connected to any financial, economic, monetary or numismatic themes explored by Peter Spufford in his oeuvre and comparative approaches are especially welcome.  Interested graduate students are asked to send an abstract for a 20-minute presentation (max. 400 words, including contact details and affiliation) and an academic CV (max. 2 pages) to Jacopo Sartori at js2214@cam.ac.uk . The deadline for proposals is Au...

The Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD) will hold its annual meeting at Wolverhampton City Campus on September 13, 2018. The theme of the meeting is "Retailing and Distribution in the Eighteenth Century." The program , accompanied by abstracts of the papers, has now been posted. On-line registration is open; please consult the meeting website for additional information. Questions may be addressed to Laura Ugolini at  l.ugolini@wlv.ac.uk .

Recent examples of business historians in the general media: Catching up with several author interviews of interest on "The Page 99 Test" : Amanda Porterfield ,  Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation Adam Winkler ,  We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights Harvey G. Cohen ,  Who's in the Money? The Great Depression Musicals and Hollywood's New Deal Michael Zakim , Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made And others in The History section of " The New Books Network" podcasts: André Magnan , When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade Christy Ford Chapin , Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System Anna Zeide , Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry Fahad Bishara , A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 In a brief article, the  Financial...

The Global History Network , the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, and the Institute of Advanced Study in Saint-Louis seek papers for a conference on “Colonial Cities in Global Perspective,” to be held in Saint-Louis, Senegal, from December 10-12, 2018. According to the call for papers : We seek papers that will examine coastal colonial cities in a comparative framework. Appropriate topics include patterns of settlement and spatial organization; administration, policing, sanitation and evolving economic profiles; labor and workers’ collective action; colonial cities’ position in global trade networks and their importance to the expansion of capitalism; trade links between urban and rural domains of production and consumption; formal and informal relations between ethnic communities; patterns of leadership and urban organization; distinctive cultural production; and historical legacies for post-colonial states. For a detail...

The German Historical Institute (GHI) has issued a call for papers for a conference on “The Transmission of Financial Knowledge in Historical Perspective, 1840–1940,” to be held at the GHI in Washington, D.C., on March 8-9, 2019. The convenors are Nicholas Osborne (Ohio University) and Atiba Pertilla (GHI Washington). The call for papers states: . . . “financial knowledge” encompasses how people teach, learn, and think about a variety of financial behaviors, from saving and investing to borrowing and spending. The conference takes as its starting point the idea that the transmission of financial knowledge, whether concepts like “family budgets,” practices such as the use of “pin money,” or folk wisdom about the nature of risk-taking, takes multiple forms, from everyday conversation and personal correspondence to mass journalism and works of fiction. . . . The organizers seek to bring together studies that address “how financial knowledge (whether accurate, false, or dubious) is ...

The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will hold its 2018 annual meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 11-14. The theme of the meeting will be "Gateways: Passages, Openings, and Enclosures in the History of Technology." The preliminary program is now available on the meeting website.    Registration is now open and may be completed online; note that fees will increase after August 31, 2018 . For more details, please consult the SHOT website .