Skip to main content

Business Historians in the News: August 2018

A number of business historians have appeared in the media recently:
With the launch of his new book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (Viking, August 2018 ), Louis Hyman has made numerous press appearances. He wrote an OpEd for the New York Times titled "It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs." He was interviewed by US News and World Report on "The Temp Economy and the Future of Work"; and he can be heard on WBUR's "On Point" discussing "The Origin Story of the Gig Economy." The book itself was the subject of a "Books of the Times" review by Jennifer Szalai.

Caitlin Rosenthal discussed her new book, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, August 2018), on NPR's "Marketplace"; she wrote about her research in "How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management" in the Boston Review; and John Griffin highlights her work in the newest issue of Harvard Magazine.

Elon Musk has been on the minds of several business historians these days. David Kirsch and Brent Goldfarb draw on research from their forthcoming book, Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation (Stanford University Press, February 2019) to discuss "Is Elon Musk Taking Tesla into a Dead End?" for Industry Week. And, for the "Tropics of Meta" blog, Gavin Benke reminds us that "Elon Musk's Meltdown Is an Old Story." Benke is the author of Risk and Ruin: Enron and the Culture of American Capitalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

W. Patrick McCray urges historians of technology to abandon the notion of "the great white innovator," in "It's Not All Lightbulbs," written for "Aeon" in conjunction with The Maintainers organization.

Regina Blaszczyk, who has written widely as a business historian of fashion and design, most recently (with Ben Wubs) in The Fashion Forecasters: A Hidden History of Color and Trend Prediction (Bloomsbury, 2018), was quoted in The Guardian's recent piece on fashion colors and culture.

For his own blog, "The Past Speaks," Andrew Smith shares some thoughts on Elizabeth Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act.

The Copenhagen Business School "Wire" interviews Per Hansen about his recent Business History Review article (linked in full text from the CBS site), co-authored with Anne Magnussen, on "Making Sense of Business and Community in Hollywood Films, 1928-2016."




Popular posts from this blog

The Exchange has moved to the BHC's website

  Dear members subscribers of The Exchange   The Exchange, the weblog of the BHC, is now part of our website ( https://thebhc.org ). We migrated the blog to serve our membership and interested parties best since Blogger is discontinuing its email service.   Note that this will be the last message we will send from Blogger .   The Exchange was founded by Pat Denault over a decade ago, and it has become an essential channel for announcements from and about the BHC and from our subscribers and members. Announcements from The Exchange will come up on the News section of our website as they did before. However, if you wish to receive these announcements via email, and you have not done so yet, please subscribe to The Exchange by: Going to our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org ), s crolling down to the end of the page, and clicking on "Subscribe to the Latest BHC News." Or go to the “News” section of our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org/ ),   and click on “The

The Exchange is changing platforms! Please read to continue receiving our messages [working links]

  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>  Through The

Regina Blaszczyk on the Business of Color

In September, MIT Press published Regina Lee Blaszczyk 's book, The Color Revolution , in which she "traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture." Readers can see some of the 121 color illustrations featured in the book at the MIT PressLog here and here . The author has recently written an essay on her research for the book in the Hagley Archives for the Hagley Library and Archives newsletter.    Reviews can be found in the New York Times , The Atlantic , Leonardo , and Imprint ; one can listen to an audio interview with Reggie Blaszczyk, and read her posts, "How Auto Shows Sparked a Color Revolution" on the Echoes blog and "True Blue: DuPont and the Color Revolution" on the Chemical Heritage Foundation website . Also available is a CHF video of the author discussing another excerpt from her rese