The Exchange

Dear colleague Given the outlook of social distancing and limited access to campus giving rise to the possibility that staff research seminars (ie brown bag) will be suspended at least until January 2021, we invite you to take active part in online seminars jointly organised by and for the business history (broadly defined) community. This aims to be a space for us to present work under development, near to submission, dealing with “rejections” or “revise and resubmit” decisions on work. The seminars aim to serve the community, hosted and promoted by the organisers, and open to any other member of the business and management community who is willing to provide supportive and constructive comments. We are seeking presenters and attendees to get things moving forward. We will appreciate your feedback by filling the poll here https://beta.doodle.com/poll/5rcxux9y9g83qyd2 with your preference and hopefully with an offer to guide/present a seminar. The poll has three choices which w...

Call for Submissions: High Speed Ground Transport in the United States The Journal of Transport History While the literature on high speed ground transport, including railways, maglev “trains,” and so-called personal rapid transit, is relatively broad and deep for Europe and Asia, the same is not true for the United States--probably because, after World War II, few American high speed projects were ever put into commercial service. This leaves significant aspects of USA ground transport history not well researched, including but not limited to initiatives to develop and commercialize frictionless vehicles in the 1960s and 1970s, and hyperloop vehicles in the past two decades; the experience of “higher speed” rail lines in the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and Florida which, arguably, are generating profits; and the partial implementation of very high speed rail projects in Texas and California, among other developments. To address gaps in USA high speed ground transport liter...

Postdoctoral Scholar / Research Associate position Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies  Deadline: June 6th, 2020 The University of Southern California’s Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies seeks applicants for a one-year post-doctoral fellowship with the possibility of renewal for a second year . Scholars with interests in founder perspectives and decision-making encouraged to apply, as are those with more specialized interests in the ethics, sociology, or history of entrepreneurship. Successful candidates will be expected to be in residence during the fellowship and to participate actively in the Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. During their term, fellows will actively collaborate with Greif Center faculty and contribute to the Center’s fellowship program in addition to conducting and publishing their own research. Moreover, the fellow may be given the option of teaching part of or all of 1-2 entrepreneurship courses per, year if qualified, with mento...

Call for Papers: Hidden Economies of Slavery Date: 10-11 December 2020 at the German Historical Institute London Deadline to send proposals: 30 June 2020 International Workshop co-organized by Melina Teubner (University of Bern) and Felix Brahm (German Historical Institute London) In many cases, abolition did not bring about an end to slavery. Local economies often continued to rely on slavery, and new forms of unfree labour were invented that involved new places and peoples. Not seldomly private as well as state actors carried on investing in, or operating ventures based on slavery, though less openly. This workshop addresses the still under-researched phenomenon of ‘second slavery’ in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It has two main directions of inquiry: firstly, it explores the reconfiguration of local and regional economies of slavery post formal abolition. How did existing structures and systems of dependency feed into the maintenance of slavery, and how did these also cha...

The Department of Modern History and Society at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU, Trondheim) offers 2 full-time 3-year PhD positions within the project "Missing Girls in Historical Europe", funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR). Preliminary evidence reconstructing infant and child sex ratios, the number of boys per hundred girls, in 19th-century European countries suggests that gender discrimination resulting in excess female mortality in infancy and childhood in historical Europe was much more important than previously thought (especially in Southern and Eastern Europe). This project seeks to (1) trace the importance of missing girls, and thus the extent of discriminatory practices, in historical Europe (c.1700-1950); (2) identify the type of families that were more likely to be involved in this kind of behaviour; and (3) address to what extent discriminatory practices in infancy and childhood are the result of structural socio-econo...

Dear subscribers of The Exchange : The BHC website's extensive list of articles, online seminars, and podcasts about the history of pandemics has been updated in the past couple of weeks. Visit the Online Research Resources BHC website here . Thanks to all contributors to the list. If you would like to add or promote other resources on this topic, please email web-admin@thebhc.org .

A team of 15 students and 2 UNC students – most undergrads, but also grad/professional students in law, public policy, business, and interdisciplinary data science -- at Duke University, led by Lee Reiners (Director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law School), Joseph Smith (former North Carolina Commissioner of Banks), and Debbie Goldstein (Director of the Duke-North Carolina Forum) just launched a new website on North Carolina's predatory lending practices pre 2008 with data visualizations, oral histories, and policy analyses. The project will continue next year. Visit the website here: http://apl.reclaim.hosting/ Also, an official announcement for the project from Duke University and Duke Law School came out on May 8th: https://law.duke.edu/news/reiners-lawrence-jdllm-21-and-others-duke-law-contribute-bass-connections-analysis-predatory [reply to [ web-editor@thebhc.or g] if you wish to reply to the Editor of  The Exchange ]

A Call for Submissions for the Essay contest on historical lessons for managers who are trying to cope with the impact of COVID-19 came out at the beginning of April. The committee has reached a decision and t he results of the contest process have been made available. Social scientists from different disciplines have used a wide variety of theoretical lenses and data sources to try to understand the COVID-19 crisis and to give actionable advice to policymakers, business leaders, and other decision-makers. In late March, an international committee of business historians organized a fast-response essay contest to see whether historical research could provide guidance at this time. Today, we announce the winners of this contest. https://www.historylessonscovid.org/ContestResults We received forty-one papers. These papers were first reviewed by a sub-committee of the Scientific Committee to determine which were suitable for publication online. We have decided to publish just  se...

Dear Subscribers to The Exchange , Professor Edward J. Balleisen's video of his Presidential Address is now available through the Business History Conference's website , or on the BHC's new YouTube Channel . The text for the presentation "The Prospects for Collaborative Research in Business History" will be available later this year on the BHC website and also published on Enterprise & Society . [reply to [ web-editor@thebhc.org ] if you wish to reply to the Editor of The Exchange ]

Dear subscribers of The Exchange : The BHC website now contains an extensive list of articles, online seminars, and podcasts about the history of pandemics. Visit the Online Research Resources BHC website here . Thanks to Professor Bernardo Batiz-Lazo for his contributions to the list. If you would like to add or promote other resources on this topic, please email web-admin@thebhc.org

Emotions and the History of Business Mandy Cooper (UNC-Greensboro) and Andrew Popp (Copenhagen Business School) We are developing a proposal for an edited volume on emotions and the history of business and seek further contributions . In the first instance, the proposal will be submitted to a series on the history of emotions edited by Peter Stearns and Susan Matt and published Bloomsbury. Why emotions and the history of business? A small but growing body of work has already begun to demonstrate the potential in bringing the histories of emotions and of business into greater dialogue.1 We aim to more fully and systematically explore that potential through this proposed volume. What does bringing emotions in add to the history of business? Does business not inhabit a world of rationality? We firmly believe that from individual entrepreneurs to family firms to massive corporations, businesses have in many ways relied on, leveraged, generated, and been shaped by emotions for ...

Call for Submissions for Special Issue Gender in Economic History Scandinavian Economic History Review Deadline is October 15 2020 Gender has long been an important category of historical analysis, nurtured by different and sometimes competing paradigms of research. In the 1970s, the study of gender was closely linked to the expansion of women’s history. Inspired by feminist and Marxist theories, this approach greatly contributed to the development of new insights on economic life, work, and remuneration in relation to women’s own experiences. Post-structural theories became more important after Joan W. Scott’s seminal article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Research” (1986). This approach considered gender as the way in which humans make knowledge about the world they inhabit, rather than something they are. However, the gender perspective was increasingly considered synonymous with the linguistic turn, discourse analysis, and the rise of the not-so-new-anymore ‘new...