The Exchange

A round-up of recent material of interest from around the web: Jane Humphries of the University of Oxford presented the Ellen McArthur Lectures at Cambridge this year. Her topic for the four-lecture series was "Eve Also Delved: Gendering Economic History"; synopses of the talks are available on the website. A recent Paris Review posted an essay on "The Entrepreneurial Kafka," detailing a plan to make money by publishing "On the Cheap" travel guides. Digital Commonwealth: Massachusetts Collections Online recently featured its collection of colorful circus posters . Many other curated collections can be accessed on the Digital Commonwealth website. Cornell University has announced a major project, "Freedom on the Move," which will create "a database that digitizes, preserves, organizes, and enables analysis of all surviving runaway ads from the historical period of North American slavery. The Yale Center for the Study of Repr...

Those researching the economic history of early Canada may find useful the Voyageur Database , which includes data from approximately 35,900 fur trade contracts signed in front of Montreal notaries between 1714 and 1830. It is currently the single largest collection of data regarding the contracts signed by participants in the Montreal fur trade. The information collected from the contracts includes: family names, parishes of origin, hiring company, length of contract, destination(s), advances and wages, supplies, conditions of hire, the name of the notary, date of signing, and miscellaneous notes. As the website explains, "The database provides information on a group that was mostly illiterate and thus previously difficult to document and write about. The Voyageur Database documents the expansion of a continental system of trade that had a profound effect on peoples and communities, throughout the continent."      The project director is Nicole St-Onge of the Un...

The next CHORD (Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution) Workshop will take place on May 24, 2016, at the University of Wolverhampton. The theme is "Retailing, Distribution, and the Family." The program, including abstracts of the presentations, is available on the Workshop website . Readers will also find registration and other useful information there.      Questions may be addressed to Laura Ugolini at Lugolini@wlv.ac.uk .

"Making Modern Disability: Histories of Disability, Design, and Technology " will meet at the Hagley Museum and Library on October 28, 2016, to explore the history of modern design and technology with regard to disability. According to the call for papers, While devices adapted to the needs of people with disabilities can be found throughout human history, industrialization created distinctive circumstances for the material lives of the disabled. On one hand, people with sensory, cognitive, and physical disabilities were often those who struggled most to adapt to modern material life with its rationalized work routines, standardized products, and inaccessible architecture. On the other hand, modern design culture was one of improvement. Designers, architects, and engineers proposed ways to adapt products and sites for users of varying abilities, while people with disabilities and their families found creative ways to improve access for themselves. Legal and policy effor...

At its recent annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, the Business History Conference announced the recipients of its two major book prizes for 2016. The Hagley Book Prize, awarded jointly by the Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History Conference to the best book in business history (broadly defined) written in English and published during the two years prior to the award, was conferred jointly on Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) by Jonathan Coopersmith of Texas A&M University, and on From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), by Vicki Howard of Hartwick College. The Ralph Gomory Prize, made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, "recognizes historical work on the effects of business enterprises on the economic conditions of the countries in which they operate." The 2016 recipient is Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creatio...

The 2017 Business History Conference (BHC) Doctoral Colloquium in Business History will be held in conjunction with the BHC annual meeting . This prestigious workshop, funded by Cambridge University Press, will take place in Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday, March 29 and Thursday, March 30, 2017. Typically limited to ten students, the colloquium is open to early-stage doctoral candidates pursuing dissertation research within the broad field of business history, from any relevant discipline. Topics ( see past examples ) may range from the early modern era to the present and explore societies across the globe. Participants work intensively with a distinguished group of BHC-affiliated scholars (including at least two BHC officers), discussing dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and career trajectories. Applications are due by November 15, 2016 , via email to BHC@Hagley.org and should include: a statement of interest; CV; preliminary or final dissertat...

The 2017 annual meeting of the Business History Conference will be held in Denver, Colorado, on March 30-April 1. The theme of the meeting is "Civilizations." In the words of the program committee--Susie Pak (chair), Eric Hilt, Caitlin Rosenthal, Lars Heide, Jessica Burch, and Walter Friedman (BHC president): From the House of Medici to Japan, Inc., business and commerce have shaped society and public life. Eighteenth-century social theorists such as Montesquieu and Smith described the “civilizing” process of long-distance trade networks in agricultural staples and luxury goods in the transition from feudalism to commercialism. In the early 20th century, the U.S. was often seen as a nation where businesspeople, with their ambitions and innovations, had even come to define society. In 1931 James Truslow Adams characterized the United States as a “business civilization,” in which “most of the energy, ability, and ambition of the country has found its outlet, if not its sa...