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Over the Counter: Issue No. 13

Edward Balleisen of Duke University will be taking over the directorship of the BHC's Doctoral Colloquium beginning with the 2016 meeting. Instituted in 2005 with JoAnne Yates as director, the Colloquium has been led for many years by Pamela W. Laird of the University of Colorado Denver. 

Joanne Bailey reviews Andrew Popp's Entrepreneurial Families (Pickering & Chatto, 2012) on her blog, "Joanne Bailey Muses on History"; readers should also check the comments section for further discussion.

Since its inauguration a few months ago, Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast, has posted nine interviews; next up is Kimberly Phillips-Fein on April 1.

Long-time BHC member Ross Thomson died on February 12, 2015. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1976 and was for many years professor of economics at the University of Vermont. An obituary has been posted by the university.

William Dalrymple has written an extended essay on the British East India Company for The Guardian: "The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders." 

Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo has a long article in The Atlantic on "A Brief History of the ATM," drawing on his research for Cash Box: The Invention and Globalization of the ATM (2013).

The Organization of American Historians has established a new blog on topics in American history, called "Process." In a recent post, Heather Lee, a post-doctoral fellow at MIT, discusses her Brown University dissertation, "Entrepreneurs in the Age of Chinese Exclusion: Transnational Capital, Migrant Labor, and Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 1850-1943.”

The History of Capitalism Initiative at Cornell University has made available all the lectures in its on-line course, "American Capitalism: A History," available on iTunes at no charge.

The supplement to volume 46 of the journal History of Political Economy is a special issue on "MIT and the Transformation of American Economics." Full access requires a personal or institutional subscription, but the abstracts and the editor's introduction are freely available.

Mark your calendars: the International Economic History Association has announced that the 2018 World Economic History Congress (WEHC) will be held in Boston, Massachusetts--the first time in fifty years that the meeting will be held in the United States.

Viveka Hansen, a textile historian and independent scholar who publishers the blog Textilis, has posted an interesting commentary on the fur trade in North America as described by a mid-eighteenth century traveler, Pehr Kalm. An index to her blog posts can be found here.

Robert MacDougall, a professor of American history at Western University in London, Ontario, was recently a guest on NPR's All Tech Considered, part of a program entitled "Long Before Net Neutrality, Rules Leveled the Landscape for Phone Services."

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