The Exchange

The 9th edition of the EBHA ( European Business History Association ) Summer School will take place in Ancona (Italy) from Monday, September 4, to Saturday, September 9, 2017. The school aims at providing doctoral students with an overview of relevant research results and of innovative tools and methodologies in the field of Business History. It is organized jointly by the European Business History Association (EBHA), the Università Politecnica delle Marche, and the Italian Association for Business History (ASSI). Students will be accommodated in the beautiful town of Ancona debating and discussing their research with leading international scholars.      The title of the school will be "Business History: Debates, Challenges and Opportunities." The school will focus on theoretical, methodological and practical issues which are of relevance for advanced research in business history. The main aim of the school is to provide students with a full understanding of the newest t...

The BHC's Liaison Committee (Alexia Yates, Vicki Howard, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, and Rowena Olegario) would like to remind everyone of the annual BHC-sponsored luncheon at the upcoming meeting of the American Historical Association in Denver . Those attending the conference who would like to take part in the lunch should purchase a ticket ($40.00) as part of the registration process.     We have another fantastic lineup this year to address a topic that cuts across multiple historical fields. The details are: "A New Materialism? The Economic and Beyond" Friday, January 6, 2017: 12:00-1:30 p.m. Mile High Ballroom 1F (Colorado Convention Center, Ballroom Level)  Speakers: Fahad Bishara, University of Virginia Christine Rosen, University of California, Berkeley Robyn d'Avignon, New York University Geoff Eley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Chair: Kenneth J. Lipartito, Florida International University  Please come along for what promises to be a l...

Last June, The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University presented a symposium on "Science & Capitalism: Entangled Histories." The description and program are available here ; papers will be published in a special issue of Osiris in 2018. The recipients of the 2016 Wadsworth Prize of the Business Archives Council are Richard Roberts and David Kynsaton for The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC . On "Pro-Market," the blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, Richard John has an extended discussion of his current research in an interview entitled "When Did Americans Stop Being Antimonopoly?" Over 75 German historians have recently protested the sudden firing of Manfred Grieger, the historian and archivist for Volkswagen who was instrumental in allowing access to the company's archives and in detailing its practices during the Second World War. The New York Times coverage, featu...

The Early American History blog The Junto has posted a multi-part examination of the recent book edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016).  The book's table of contents, which includes essays by--among many others--Edward Baptist, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua Rothman, Kathryn Boodry,  and John Majewski, is available here . The volume is the product of a 2011 conference organized jointly by Harvard and Brown universities. The forum essays are: Tom Cutterham, "Forum Introduction" Casey Schmitt, "The Global and the Hemispheric" Justin Leroy, "Commodities and Agents in the History of Slavery" Christy Clark-Pujara, "Slave Economies of the U.S. North"   Kevin Waite, "Slavery's Civil War?"

Hosted by the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand (EHSANZ), the annual  Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History (APEBH) Conference will be held on February 9-11, 2017, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). The theme will be "Current Trends in Economic and Business History Research." According to the call for papers , Researchers across a broad range of disciplines are warmly welcomed. Early career researchers are encouraged to participate. The conference organisers are also particularly interested in attracting papers that examine topics in the context of the Asia-Pacific region and papers that provide an international comparative perspective, in particular for settler-economies like Australia and New Zealand. The conference looks for new research from a number of perspectives, including those of the cliometrician, the business historian, the applied economist, as well as the social historian. There is ample scope for new interp...

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), in collaboration with the Minnesota Digital Library, has mounted an on-line exhibit on "Quack Cures and Self-Remedies: Patent Medicine." As the introduction says, "The story of patent medicine is multi-layered. It is about the phenomenon of Americans self-medicating with opiates, alcohol, and herbal supplements, as well as women’s health and healthcare options. It follows the evolution of advertising in America and the rise of chromolithography printing techniques and newspaper advertisements." The well-illustrated site contains brief essays on various aspects of the role of patent medicines in American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.     The DPLA itself is the home of an ever-growing list of on-line exhibits of interest, including the shoe industry in Massachusetts, the transcontinental railroad, the Gold Rush, and many more.

For nearly two decades, Gerard Koot , professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (emeritus since 2010), taught NEH Summer Seminars--first on the Industrial Revolution in Britain , and, more recently, on "The Dutch Republic and Britain: The Making of a European World Economy." In the course of those efforts, Koot compiled websites for the projects that contain a wealth of useful materials. The sites include essays by Koot on specific topics, illustrations, bibliographies, and links to primary sources. Also included are students' papers for all the years of the Seminar.     Because these NEH summer seminars are directed at K-12 teachers, most of the materials are designed to be useful for teaching.