Paige Glotzer, working on a dissertation on "the history of suburban development in the United States between 1890 and 1960" at the Johns Hopkins University, was recently the AHA's Spotlight Member. She presented a paper on her work at the 2015 BHC meeting.
Many sites reported the recent death of Stanford economic historian Nathan Rosenberg, who published important work on the history of technological change. Stanford's remembrance is here; Richard Langlois comments here. Patrick Fridenson has posted Joel Mokyr's remembrance from EH.Net here.
The Library at Villanova University is digitizing its collection of dime novels. The project is ongoing; first fruits are now available. There is also a web exhibit, "Paper for the People: Dime Novels and Early Mass Market Publishing."
JSTOR Daily reports on dismay among preservationists at the US Postal Service's decision to sell post office buildings, many containing murals and other artwork from the New Deal era, to private developers. Interested readers can find many examples of New Deal art and architecture at the Living New Deal Project.
Another recent issue of JStor Daily features Susannah Walker's article from the initial year of Enterprise & Society, "Black Is Profitable: The Commodification of the Afro, 1960-1975" (September 2000, 536-564).
The Wall Street Journal's reviewer, Edward Rothstein, takes issue with the "bottom up" approach of the Smithsonian's American Enterprise exhibit in his commentary on August 17.
A number of business-related poster and label collections have been featured on-line recently:
Vintage airline posters from the San Diego Air and Space MuseumThe University of Michigan Library is also hosting a new web exhibit, "The Reflection of Technology in Beer Brewing"
Lobster labels from the Nova Scotia Archives
Political posters from the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan
H-Environment published a roundtable review of Bartow Elmore's Citizen Coke. Commentators included Shane Hamilton, Edward Melillo, Gabriella Petrick, and Richard Tucker, with an introduction by Christopher Jones and a response from Elmore. On a related note, the University of West Virginia Press has announced a new book series on "Histories of Capitalism and the Environment," to be edited by Elmore.
The program for the McNeil Center graduate student conference, "Bustle &Stir: Movement and Exchange in Early America," is up on the MCEAS website.The meeting will be held October 8-10, 2015.
Germain Sicard's 1952 thesis, The Origins of Corporations: The Mills of Toulouse in the Middle Ages, published in English translation by Yale University Press in August, is featured in the Yale Press blog article, "The World's First Corporations."
The July 2015 issue of the Journal of Policy History is a special theme issue on "The Governance of International Communications: Business, Politics, and Standard-Setting in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries"; authors include Richard R. John, Heidi Tworek, Simone Müller, Frank Beyersdorf, Hugh Slotten, and Craig Murphy and JoAnne Yates. (Articles require a subscription, but abstracts are freely available.)
The program for the Special Interest Group on Computers, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) workshop at the upcoming SHOT meeting is available on-line.
Louis Hyman has an essay in the Pacific Standard on "The Future of Work: The Second Industrious Revolution."
Morten Jerven's Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong (Zed, 2015) is reviewed by Alex de Waal for African Arguments in an essay entitled "Liberating African Economic History from the Tyranny of Econometrics." Interested readers can learn more about the book on Jerven's blog.
The Tjidschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis has published a special issue (2015, no. 2) ( in English) on "Escaping the Great Divergence? A discussion about and in response to Peer Vries's Escaping Poverty. The Origins of Modern Economic Growth." (Access requires a subscription, but contents are freely available after one year.)