The Exchange

The 2011 edition of BEH On-Line , a series devoted to edited essays from the Business History Conference annual meetings, is complete. Readers may freely access all of the 18 essays in this issue, as well as any of the 199 previous essays.  A cumulative author index is available. Each year's issue also includes the program and paper abstracts from that year's meeting.  BEH On-Line is the successor publication of the BHC's Business and Economic History , print collections of papers from the annual meetings.  The complete run of Business and Economic History , 1962-1999, can be accessed from the BHC website, and includes a cumulative index as well.

The American Historical Association has released the preliminary version of the program for the 2012 annual meeting, which will be held in Chicago, Illinois, on January 5-8. As announced earlier , the Business History Conference is now an AHA-affiliated organization and as such can propose sessions for the meeting (though with no guarantee of acceptance). The BHC is sponsoring three sessions in Chicago, which can be found from the BHC sessions page. They include: session 95 , "The Business of Media History: Technology, Journalism, Advertising," chaired by Pamela Walker Laird and featuring papers by Richard John , Anna McCarthy , Lynn Spigel , and James L. Baughman ; session BHC2 , "Writing History at The Wall Street Journal ," chaired by Daniel Levinson-Wilk; and session 189 , "Everyday Calculations: Varieties of Commercial Numeracy in Early America," chaired by Patricia Cline Cohen and including papers by Caitlin Rosenthal , Thomas Wickham , Molly Mc...

A conference on "The Trade in Luxury and the Luxury of Trade," focusing on the production, display, and circulation of precious objects from the Middle Ages to the present day, will be held November 22-23, 2012, at the Musée Gadagne in Lyon. The conference is being organized by the Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA). The organizers explain: t he objective is to reveal the richness and diversity of a phenomenon referred to as ‘luxury,’ and the progressive emergence of specialized markets. Two specific approaches will thus be developed in the conference: on the one hand, a focus on people and goods, and on the other hand, a focus on points of sale and the material and symbolic power deriving from this particular sector of the economy. Paper proposals should be sent to Alain Bonnet at the University of Nantes and to Natacha Coquery , at the University of Lyon 2. The deadline for submissions is January 1, 2012 . For a full explanation of the meeting...

In 1992 the libraries of the University of Western Ontario tried to identify the company histories scattered throughout their holdings and to pull them together in one source, Business & History at Western: A Guide to Selected Resources in the UWO Library System . This work has now been placed on-line, at an expanded and on-going site, Books about Companies . As the compilers explain, Since 1992 more company-related books have been discovered in the stacks and many more have been published. . . . The list is continually under construction and new company histories are added as they arrive. As well, we have included the company histories that are often found (but rarely indexed) in reference works or in books about industries. For example, this guide will direct you to the company histories found in The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising and to the short sketches found in The World Guide to Automobile Manufacturers .    Although the great majority of the ent...

Kevin Tennant, on his Business History blog, has posted a report on the recent British Academy of Management (BAM) meeting and the success of his and John Wilson's attempt "to revive the Business and Management History track" at this annual conference. Participants in the track included Andrew Godley, Terry Gourvish, and Stephanie Decker. The full listing can be found on the BAM program , at page 61. One promising aspect, Tennent reports, is the interest among management scholars in undertaking archival research, as demonstrated at a workshop session in which he talked about "Business Archives: why they are relevant to management academics and how to use them."    Tennent concludes that "the papers . . . , together with the workshop sessions, contributed to a healthy meeting of minds and a forging of many new networking opportunities for all involved." Tip of the hat to Andrew Smith's blog .

At its recent meeting, the Economic History Association awarded its Jonathan Hughes Prize to Ann Carlos , professor of economics at the University of Colorado and a longtime BHC member. Her research interests focus on the Canadian fur trade and on the growth and development of comparative business organizations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is the author most recently of Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European Fur Trade (with Frank Lewis) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).   The EHA awards the prize, which recognizes excellence in teaching economic history, each year at its annual meeting. The award is given in honor of Jonathan Hughes, scholar and committed and influential teacher of economic history, former chair of the Economics Department at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Vital Few: The Entrepreneur and American Economic Progress (1966; Oxford University Press, 1986...

Earlier this month JSTOR , the well-known repository of journal articles, made pre-1923 content available without charge; for materials published outside the United States, the date is 1870. The copyright term outside the United States is set at the life of the author plus seventy years, so JSTOR picked 1870 as "a reasonable date to assume that all copyright is expired." JSTOR also released a FAQ explaining the decision and usage terms.     The JSTOR homepage now contains a direct link to a search site with an option to limit one's search to free access articles, which number almost a half million; if one searches the entire site, free materials are designated by a check mark icon.      In another development, the American Historical Association announced that, as of September 1, 2011, its on-line jobs listing will be available to everyone, not only to AHA members. Nonmembers can access the ads after a simple registration process that requires cr...