The Exchange

Upcoming virtual seminars by the Business History Collective  July 6th- Zoi Pittaki, Brunel University Negotiating for a ransom from the taxpayers’: Exploring the roots of systematic tax evasion and avoidance in Greece from an Institutional Perspective Host: Niall McKenzie, Glasgow University July 17th- Round table : How to navigate the process of writing your first post-Ph.D. publication Stephen Chambers (Winthrop Group and author), Gabriela Recio (Business History Group and author), Emily Buchnea (Northumbria University) , TBC Host: TBC For more information visit: https://unternehmensgeschichte.de/Online-Seminare

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

[Posted in H-Business] Shell Oil’s Deepwater Mission to Mars , by Tyler Priest Announcing a new multi-media website, https://dsps.lib.uiowa.edu/mars-deepwater-gulf/ devoted to documenting and narrating the story of Royal Dutch Shell’s pioneering development of the Mars basin in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (3,000 feet of water). The story of deepwater oil in the Gulf of Mexico can be told through the story of Mars, historically the largest single source of crude oil in American waters.  It was one of the earliest prospects to be drilled and developed on some of the first federal deepwater leases offered in the early 1980s.  In the late 2010s, thirty-five years later, it remains one of the most productive basins in the Gulf at the cutting edge of technology. More than any other project in the Gulf of Mexico, Mars (and the development of its adjacent fields, Ursa, Europa, Deimos, and West Boreas) documents the wide-ranging innovations that have propelled the industry in...

The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) has introduced a blog on its website called "Technology Stories." Edited by Suzanne Moon and Gerardo Con Diaz, the site aims to engage readers with the usable past—stories that help us make sense of contemporary technological challenges and aspirations. Technology’s Stories is a place for thinkers to share new insights on the integration of technology with our environments and our social, political, and economic lives. Published several times a year, "issues" feature three to four essays each; after three years, the site now contains many "Technology Stories," ranging from John K. Brown's 2014 discussion of the Eads Bridge and the analytic use of the "constrained counterfactual " to Marie Hicks's recent post on ingrained gender discrimination in the computing industry, "A Feature, Not a Bug."     Readers can find the full index to the site's essays here .

The Doing History podcast, edited by Liz Covart and recently brought under the auspices of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC), has been producing high-quality material for several years now. Recent episodes have been focusing on the American Revolution, and the last three topics may be of particular interest to economic and business historians working in the colonial America field: The Revolutionary Economy , featuring Serena Zabin of Carleton College, author of Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) The Politics of Tea , featuring Jane Merritt of Old Dominion University, author of The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy (Johns Hopkins University Press) Smuggling and the American Revolution , with guests including Wim Klooster, Fabricio Prado, and Christian Koot In addition to links provided with each episode, additional mate...

After three years of processing, preserving, and cataloging, Hagley Library announced this week that the contents of the David Sarnoff Library collection are now fully available to the public, including 700 digital images available through the Hagley Digital Archives . The collection includes thousands of linear feet of documents, reports, photographs, films, and publications detailing the rise and fall of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and of Sarnoff, its longtime leader.     In December 2013, Hagley Library was awarded a $291,500 grant by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to process and make accessible the collections of the David Sarnoff Library. Employing two project archivists, Daniel Michelson and Kenneth Cleary, a number of graduate assistants and interns from the University of Delaware, and occupying a number of its library staff, Hagley completed the David Sarnoff Library Processing Project in May 2017.     “Hagle...

The early Americanist blog "The Junto"  has been running a roundtable on colonial couture, "fashion as history in early American life." Some of the posts have a more direct business connection than others, but all provide interesting insights. The introductory post also includes a bibliography and list of relevant websites, as do many of the essays. The list of posts: Sara Georgini , "Roundtable: Colonial Couture" Charmaine A. Nelson , "Cash’s Bundle: Fugitive Slave Advertisements, Clothing, and Self-Care" Ben Marsh , "Making American Pompoms Great Again" William Howard Carter , "New York's Original Fashion Industry" Joanna M. Gohmann , "Ambassador in a Hat: The Sartorial Power of Benjamin Franklin’s Fur Cap" Kimberly Alexander , "Fashioning the 17th Century in Boston: John and Hannah Leverett" Laura E, Johnson , "Of Records and Rituals: Native Americans and the Textile Trade" Zara ...

In 2015 the BHC Trustees appointed Michael Aldous (Queen's University, Belfast) to serve as the inaugural Teaching and Research Resources Web Editor. He has now written an introductory essay to launch a new section of the Teaching and Resources portion of the BHC website, one that will "promote the excellent teaching resources, whilst providing context, particularly for those not immersed in Business History, and offering insights and inspiration regarding their use." In his essay, "Rethinking Business History in the Classroom," Aldous writes, "I would like to invite members of the BHC community to contribute short pieces that discuss the many and varied ways in which business history [is] being used across disciplines in classrooms, and through these entries foster a wider discussion on these opportunities."      Further essays will be published throughout the year; upcoming is a discussion with Paolo Quattrone about visualization and history ...

"The Maintainers: A Conference" will take place at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, on April 7-9, 2016. Even those not attending can enjoy the fruits of the meeting, as the papers are freely available online. Most of them have now been posted, linked from the conference program . According to the introductory website, "All [participants] share an interest in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world. Presentations will cover a wide variety of technologies and practices, including software, spaceflight, trolleys, meteorology, digital archives, and the politics of funding for infrastructure." More information is available on the conference website .

"Commodity Histories," according to its founders, is a public forum for research postings, news and information about the history of commodities. Our aim is to raise public awareness of the rich histories and cultures of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America via their crucial role in the growing of crops and the production of commodities that have become an indispensable aspect of people’s daily lives throughout the world.       The site contains a number of resources, under the rubric "Research Journeys." The project organizers are also maintaining a directory of scholars and others with an interest in various topics in commodity history, as well as links to other related projects; suggestions for contributions can be made through the site's contact form.       "Commodity Histories" is organized by Sandip Hazareesingh from the Open University’s History Department, and Jon Curry-Machado . It has been produced by the Open Unive...

The editors of the American Historical Review and Past and Present have created a "virtual journal issue" on "Slavery and Anti-Slavery in the Atlantic World" ; all the included articles will be freely available for downloading for "a short period of time."     The issue consists entirely of previously published articles, except for a new introduction by the editors (Rob Schneider and Matthew Hilton) "tracing the evolution of the field through the pages of both journals." Among the essays of particular interest are those by Thomas Haskell in the AHR on "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility"; by Seymour Drescher on Dutch capitalism and antislavery; and, in Past and Present , by Mark Smith on plantation capitalism in the antebellum South.

The just-launched Scottish Business History Network "aims to connect all those - both individuals and organisations - with an interest in Scottish business history and business archives. Membership is free and open to anyone with an interest in business archives and business history in Scotland and beyond, with a view to encouraging partnerships and the building of links between allied sectors." The site now contains a number of brief archival case studies, "developed to show how a wide variety of businesses, archives and heritage organisations have used their business archive collections." A number of others are available on the Scottish Council on Archives website.    For more information, please see the network's website .

A historical GIS project of interest is "Mapping American Social Movements," directed by James Gregory at the University of Washington. According to the website, This collaborative digital project is assembling data and visualizations about dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics during the 20th century, including radical movements, labor movements, women's movements, many different civil rights movements, environmentalist movements, and more. . . . This project allows us to explore the relationships between social movements by bringing them together in time and space. It enables new understandings of how social movements interact and how they reproduce and change over time. The project is ongoing, with plans to add new data and topics over time. Currently the project includes data on the "activist geography" of the NAACP, the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist Party. Future topics ...

The December 2015 issue of the Journal of Economic History has a special essay section on "The Future of Economic History," all of which is currently freely available. The section is a result of a session at the 2015 Economic History Association meeting, celebrating the organization's 75th anniversary. The essays are: William J. Collins, "Looking Forward: Positive and Normative Views of Economic History" Kris James Mitchener, "The 4D Future of Economic History: Digitally-Driven Data Design" Ran Abramitzky, "Economics and the Modern Economic Historian" Naomi Lamoreaux, "The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary"

Christmas Eve, and time for another small gift from "The Exchange": more sources positioning the holiday in business and historical terms (the first list can be found here ): "Christmas Season Starts Earlier Every Year" (actually not): "Saving Santa's Mail Bag" (the Post Office and Letters to Santa) "A Brief History of the Holiday Card" (Ellen Brown on JStor Daily) and also on The Takeaway (audio interview) "19th Century Christmas Cards Gain New Admirers" (AAS, on Louis Prang) "Louis Prang, Father of the Christmas Card" (NYHS) Alison Barnes on "The First Christmas Tree " ( History Today ) Bernd Brunner on "Inventing the Christmas Tree" Dickens' expenses for printing "A Christmas Carol" A Christmas Carol (modern-day economics edition) ( The Guardian )  Santa Claus and Coca Cola  Santa Claus and Thomas Nast  "When Santa Was a Bank," from Stephen Mihm 12 Days...

Many archives now have at least one blog, often used  to present snippets of interesting research that feature the institution's holdings. Some time ago, we highlighted the Hagley's "Stories from the Stacks," a podcast in which scholars discuss their research in light of materials found in the Hagley archives. Another blog of interest is Conversant, the blog of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts. Recently Dan Du served as a guest blogger for Conversant, writing about "A Tea Talk: Discovering the History of American Tea Business at the Phillips Library." Dan Du is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, working on her dissertation, “This World in a Teacup: Chinese-American Tea Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” which examines a century-long commercial and cultural interaction between Chinese and Americans through the lens of tea.     Other business history-related posts from Conversant include "Land Disputes i...

The annual meeting of SHEAR (the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) got under way yesterday in Raleigh, North Carolina. The conference website features a section on "Panel Resources," where panelists can post information relevant to their presentations. One of the sessions of interest (see here for a more detailed list) is "Capital, Space, and Culture: New Approaches to the Political Economy of the Early Republic"; presenters in that session have posted short versions of their papers in the resource section. Members of another panel, "Teaching Capitalism in Early America," have created a "resource archive" website for their session that includes syllabi and class assignments.     The full meeting schedule can be found on the conference website.

"England's Immigrants, 1330-1550" is a large new searchable database of over 64,000 resident aliens living in England during those years, containing information on names, nationalities, places of residence and origin, occupation and status.  According to the website: it is evident from various sources that a remarkably diverse range of immigrants entered England during the later Middle Ages, from other parts of the British Isles, from the near-continent, and from other, more distant locations. It is also clear that these people were drawn from a far broader variety of social and economic backgrounds than just the upper echelons on which modern research has concentrated. Researchers consulted "alien subsidy" records, license rolls, records of oaths of fealty, and letters of protection and denization, among other sources, to compile the database. A more thorough explanation of the sources used is provided on the website. Researchers have also compiled mor...

"Imagining Markets" is a combined website to report information relevant to two projects hosted by the University of Exeter’s History Department: "Imagining Markets: Conceptions of Europe, Empire/Commonwealth and China in Britain’s Economic Future since 1900" (AHRC network, 2014-16), established by David Thackeray, Andrew Thompson, and Richard Toye, and David Thackeray’s AHRC Research Leadership Fellowship: "Backing Britain: Imagining a Nation’s Economic Future since 1900" (2014-15). As the initial post explains, "Both projects are united by an interest in connecting historical and contemporary ways of thinking about Britain’s future global economic orientation, and involve a range of activities staged with project partners from the fields of public policy and heritage organisations." The website includes a blog, notices of events, and descriptions of the primary and related projects.

Those unable to attend the recent anniversary conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES), "Economic History's Many Muses," can find most of the papers freely available for download on the conference website. Presenters included Joseph Adelman, Caitlin Rosenthal, Stephen Mihm, Seth Rockman, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, Michelle Craig McDonald, and Dael Norwood; the full program is posted here .