The Exchange

The Living New Deal Project at the University of California, Berkeley, has released an interactive map that will eventually show every New Deal project in the United States and territories. One can focus in on an individual area, or even an individual project; the site supplies basic details for each item listed. One can also search by project type or a combination of place and type. The site offers illustrations of many artworks and construction projects completed under the auspices of New Deal agencies. According to the designers, "Our goal is to inventory and map all New Deal public works across the nation. We want to involve Americans in a collective rediscovery of what New Deal agencies did to extricate this country from the Great Depression and lay the foundation for postwar prosperity." The project is directed by Richard Walker, professor emeritus of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1975 to 2012.

The German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., offers a number of fellowships of direct interest to business historians. Doctoral Fellowship in International Business History Preference for this 6- to 12-month fellowship in International Business History will be given to applicants whose projects fit into the GHI's research foci on transatlantic relations and the history of consumption. Comparative work is also strongly encouraged. The monthly stipend is €1,700 for doctoral students from European institutions; students based at North American institutions will receive a stipend of $1,900. In addition, fellowship recipients based in Europe will receive reimbursement for their round-trip airfare to the United States. Fellowship in Economic and Social History   Preference for this fellowship is given to applicants on the postdoctoral level. Candidates doing original research for a second book project will be preferred. The monthly stipend is €3,000 for EU citizens and $3,20...

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 .

Karen Cox's "Pop South" has a post on the history of the Aunt Jemima advertising campai gn and a discussion of the women on whom the ad campaign was based. Slate has an article on the world's oldest businesses and why so many of them are in Japan. At the "History of Economics Playground," Beatrice Cherrier has an interesting post on the development of the JEL code s. Congratulations to Bernardo Batiz-Lazo of Bangor Business School, whose co-authored (with Tobias Karlsson and Björn Thodenius) paper, "“The Origins of the Cashless Society: Cash Dispensers, Direct-to-Account Payments and the Development of On-Line Real Time Networks, C. 1965-1985,” was a co-winner of the Soltow Award for the best paper published in Essays in Business and Economic History , the journal of the Economic and Business History Society. The paper is freely available here . A research group founded at the University of Portsmouth, "Port Towns and Urban Cultur...

The Hispanic Liverpool Project , based at the University of Warwick, investigates the city's role as a hub in the networks of trade, commerce, migration, travel, tourism, politics, and culture that connected the Anglophone and the Luso-Hispanic worlds during the long nineteenth century. The project seeks to gather, record, and interpret the stories of the people who inhabited those networks, the trading connections they forged and exploited, the places they lived, worked, and are remembered, and the traces one can still find of them today, in Liverpool and elsewhere. According to project coordinator Kirsty Hooper , The Hispanic Liverpool Project works with a range of sources, including shipping records, trade directories, census returns, church records, newspaper articles, travel guides, memoirs and company archives. It combines a macrohistorical approach, which aims to understand Liverpool's place in the grand narratives of nineteenth-century Anglophone and Luso-Hispan...

The German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, has issued a call for papers for “Financialization: A New Chapter in the History of Capitalism?” to be held at the GHI on June 12-13, 2015. The conveners of this workshop are Hartmut Berghoff (Washington, DC), Kenneth Lipartito (Miami), and Laura Rischbieter (Berlin). The call for papers states: The term “financialization” is understood by most authors to refer to the shift since 1970 from industrial to finance capitalism, a shift that had profound social and political repercussions. Over the past few decades traditional industrial economies became dominated by financial capitalism. Financial services now constitute a large and increasing share of output in the world’s most advanced industrial nations. Financial institutions have grown to enormous size, magnified by various mechanisms of financial leverage. Capital markets have gained the ability to influence and limit national economic priorities. Financialization also influen...

The Economic and Social History Section, History Institute, Leiden University, will partner with the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI) to host a joint conference on June 2-5, 2015, under the theme "Agents, Networks, Institutions and Empires." According to the call for papers: Agents, networks and institutions are the cornerstones of empire-building. This applies to European and non-European empires, originating in the late Middle Ages, Early Modern, Modern or Contemporary period. The agency of individuals, by themselves or in various groups and communities, forged the first contacts between colonizers and colonized. At the same time, the individual and collective capacity to negotiate personal and communal interests brought about autonomy and forms of self-government in various colonized societies. Through perennial exchanges institutions were created, changed and adapted to the needs, demands and impositions of expanding empires. FEEGI has ...