Some Christmas Cheer, Business History-Style

For those of you celebrating Christmas today, very best wishes from The Exchange. As a small gift, we provide the following history-related sites of interest:

From The Smithsonian online, a brief history of the Christmas card and a sampling of holiday cards from Smithsonian collections; the New-York Historical Society blog details the influence of Louis Prang on the American Christmas card market.
And the Postal Museum has an interesting essay about "Holiday Parcels in World War I"; and for collectors, a history of the art of Christmas stamps;
Anne L. Murphy writes about Christmas and New Year's bonuses for 18th-century bankers
This archive provides over 25,000 pages of vintage Christmas catalogs from Sears, Lord & Taylor, Spiegel, Montgomery Ward, and several others.
The Hagley Vault features a series of Christmas-related materials from its holdings.
Ellen Caldwell explains "How Charles Dickens Set the American Christmas Dinner Table" for JSTOR Daily.
From the St. Louis Federal Reserve blog, "A Quick History of the Christmas Tree Industry" (The original article, published by the Philadelphia Fed, is available here, but may take a very long time to load.)
The Hartman Center at Duke University blogs about its recent acquisition of the 1939 Montgomery Ward booklet that introduced "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" to the world.
From the National Electrical Contractors Association, a brief history of electric Christmas lights; and more here: "Old Christmas Tree Lights"
"Yule and Misrule" highlights interactions between fishermen and merchants in maritime Canada in the late 18th century, from the Borealia blog

Digital Collection: Princeton Exhibit of Subway Posters

The Princeton University Library has digitized a number of posters from the Interborough Rapid Transit Subway Company . The posters, designed by the public relations firm Ivy Lee, were displayed in subway cars to provide information to riders about changes in fares and routes, safety issues, and other matters of interest. The collection consists of 385 images dating from 1918 to 1932; many of them provide financial information about rates, company dividends, and a general look at an early rapid transit system. October 29, update: Jonathan Rees over at "More or Less Bunk" was moved by this post to go off in search of a better site, and found the massive collection of the London Transport Museum , which displays over 5,000 items in a searchable collection .

The Exchange has moved to the BHC's website

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Dear subscribers to The Exchange: I am happy to announce that our blog is moving platforms. For almost a decade, the Business History Conference has used Blogger to publish and archive posts. However, in early 2021, the blogging site announced that their email serving service would be terminated. In addition, we noticed that many of our subscribers had stopped receiving the blog’s emails, and our subscription provides very limited reporting. In agreement, the Electronic Media Oversight Committee , web administrator Shane Hamilton, and web editor Paula de la Cruz-Fernández decided to move our web blog from Blogger to our website . We now write to you to request that if you wish to continue receiving announcements from the BHC, please subscribe here: https://thebhc.org/subscribe-exchange Interested people will be asked to log into their BHC’s account or open one, free. If you have questions, please email The Business History Conference <web-admin [at] thebhc.org>...

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