The program for the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) annual meeting, held in June, remains available online; several panels address topics relating business, economics, and foreign relations.
George Robb can be viewed discussing his book Ladies of the Ticker at the Museum of American Finance on YouTube.
Two bits of news from MIT:
The program for the recent meeting of the Society for the Study of French History, held at the University of Warwick, UK, is available online. With a theme of "Political Economy and Cultures of Inequality," the meeting had several sessions of interest, including a keynote by Michael Kwass on "Capitalism and Inequality in Eighteenth-Century France: Writing History after the Great Recession."
- an interview with Anne McCants, vice-president of the International Economic History Association and chair of the World Congress, which opens in Boston this week.
- an interview with MIT faculty member Caley Horan about her book manuscript, "Actuarial Age," which explores the cultural life of insurance and the role of risk-based thinking in shaping American institutions and daily life during the second half of the 20th century.
For the blog "The Conversation," Jon Stobart reflects on "The Forgotten Grandeur of Britain's Department Stores."
From the 2018 meeting of the Economic History Society, the video of Sevket Pamuk delivering the Tawney Lecture is now available; his topic: "Uneven Development: The Economic Development of Turkey since 1820."
Saddened to report two deaths, both on July 5, 2018: Morton "Mickey" Keller, long-time faculty member at Brandeis University, is probably best known to business historians for his work Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933 (1990). The departmental obituary is here.
Ira Berlin, of the University of Maryland, was the Bancroft Prize-winning author of Many Thousands Gone and many other notable works on the history of slavery and the slave trade. The Nation published a remembrance by Eric Foner.
The Canadian Business History Association has put video of sessions of its recent meeting, which coincided with Canada's sesquicentennial, online.
The Hagley Library and Museum has announced the acquisition of the James W. Cortada Collection of Information Technology Publications, an estimated 5,000 titles on the general subject of computers, information technology, society, the internet, and the economic and business issues involving computers from the 1940s through 2017. Processing is underway so materials can be made open to researchers as quickly as possible.
From the "Artsy" blog comes an interesting discussion by Lucy Hunter on "The Untold History of Corporations Recruiting Artists to Inspire Their Employees."
The "Knowledge@Wharton" blog recently interviewed Adam Winkler about his book We, the Corporations; both transcript and audio are available. And over at Harvard Business School, the "Working Knowledge" website featured Ai Hisano's research on "How Cellophane Changed the Way We Shop for Food."
On his "Mostly IP History" blog, Zvi Rosen resurrects Robert Fulton's 1811 steamboat patent, thought to have been lost; images (of copies) of the patent specification pages are here.
"The Junto" blog published a multi-part roundtable on Francis Spufford's 2017 novel Golden Hill, set in colonial New York City. The essays are
" 'Commerce is Trust'," by Tom CutterhamFor "Food + City," Jonathan Rees, author of Refrigeration Nation, writes at length about the inception of the "cold chain"--the distribution of refrigerated foods--and how it changed our diets: "Transcending Seasons: Following the Global Cold Chain."
"Golden Hill as Historical Fiction," by Jordan E. Taylor
"Courage and Cowardice?" by Hannah Farber
"Retracing Mr. Smith's Steps through Eighteenth-Century Manhattan," by Katy Lasdow
"Q&A with Francis Spufford"
The EBHS has made available the video of Deirdre McCloskey's keynote address at the organization's recent annual meeting in Finland; her topic was "What We Need to Know in Business and Economic History: The Conditions for Exchange-Tested Betterment."