The Exchange

Dear Subscribers to The Exchange, The Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography has been updated with new references (a total of 207 entries). Visit the BHC website to copy the list or visit and join the Zotero Group Bibliography to export the references or contribute to the list. Contributors may also send suggestions by (a) emailing additional references to Anne Fleming of the BHC Electronic Media Oversight Committee <acf80 at law.georgetown.ed> or BHC Web Editor Paula de la Cruz-Fernández <padelacruzf at gmail.com> and (b) tweeting titles to @TheBHCNews .

[An announcement from Professor John Turner] Dear economic historians I am writing to alert you to the Economics Observatory (ECO), a new website that is being launched this week to answer questions from policy-makers and the public about the economics of the Covid-19 crisis and the recovery . The initiative, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), draws on the expertise of economists from a wide range of universities and research institutions. It will gather and evaluate the best possible data and evidence and use these as the basis for Q&A briefings on the ECO website: https://coronavirusandtheeconomy.com/ Economic research is essential to understand and respond to this massive public health challenge and the global economic crisis. But it can be difficult for policy-makers and the public to interpret the key evidence and to understand where there is – and is not – consensus in the economic research community. We will explain where there is...

Dear subscribers of The Exchange : The BHC website's extensive list of articles, online seminars, and podcasts about the history of pandemics has been updated in the past couple of weeks. Visit the Online Research Resources BHC website here . Thanks to all contributors to the list. If you would like to add or promote other resources on this topic, please email web-admin@thebhc.org .

A team of 15 students and 2 UNC students – most undergrads, but also grad/professional students in law, public policy, business, and interdisciplinary data science -- at Duke University, led by Lee Reiners (Director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law School), Joseph Smith (former North Carolina Commissioner of Banks), and Debbie Goldstein (Director of the Duke-North Carolina Forum) just launched a new website on North Carolina's predatory lending practices pre 2008 with data visualizations, oral histories, and policy analyses. The project will continue next year. Visit the website here: http://apl.reclaim.hosting/ Also, an official announcement for the project from Duke University and Duke Law School came out on May 8th: https://law.duke.edu/news/reiners-lawrence-jdllm-21-and-others-duke-law-contribute-bass-connections-analysis-predatory [reply to [ web-editor@thebhc.or g] if you wish to reply to the Editor of  The Exchange ]

The  University of Florida's History Department program in the History of Capitalism  has created a curated and searchable database of corporate archives and is proud to announce that this new digital resource is now available. The name and virtual location of the database are Inquire Capitalism at  https://inquirecapitalism. omeka.net/ .  Inquire Capitalism seeks to both unify information about corporate archives and also to connect scholars, archivists, and businesses by making information about company archives more discoverable. In addition, the researchers collecting the information about company archives have focused on finding out what is the digital presence of companies' history, whether through digital archives or by having heritage sites and chronologies as part of the company's website. The database contains information mostly about the United States, but the team at the University of Florida plans to continue expanding the list by including info...

The Consumer Reports Archives at the Rubenstein Library (Duke University Libraries) cover the operations of the nonprofit organization starting in 1924 through 2015. The "massive collection" was acquired as part of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in 2019. It is now open for research as archivists and catalogers continue to fully process the collection. The finding aid describes the collection in detail: "Consumer Reports is a product testing and consumer advocacy nonprofit organization based in Yonkers, N.Y., founded in 1936. The Consumer Reports Archive was first established in 1972 as the Center for the Study of Consumer Movements. Collection includes correspondence, forms, photographs, policy and procedure statements and other printed materials that pertain to the operation support activities of the Consumer Union Archives. Included are files relating to archival administration and records management for the organization,...

[Posted in H-Business] Shell Oil’s Deepwater Mission to Mars , by Tyler Priest Announcing a new multi-media website, https://dsps.lib.uiowa.edu/mars-deepwater-gulf/ devoted to documenting and narrating the story of Royal Dutch Shell’s pioneering development of the Mars basin in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (3,000 feet of water). The story of deepwater oil in the Gulf of Mexico can be told through the story of Mars, historically the largest single source of crude oil in American waters.  It was one of the earliest prospects to be drilled and developed on some of the first federal deepwater leases offered in the early 1980s.  In the late 2010s, thirty-five years later, it remains one of the most productive basins in the Gulf at the cutting edge of technology. More than any other project in the Gulf of Mexico, Mars (and the development of its adjacent fields, Ursa, Europa, Deimos, and West Boreas) documents the wide-ranging innovations that have propelled the industry in...

New Collection Available Digitally DeGolyer Library's Texas National Bank Note collection The 972 National Bank Notes from the DeGolyer Library’s Rowe-Barr Collection of Texas Currency are now available online. This “TexTreasures” digitization project was funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services through a grant to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. The largest known collection of paper currency specific to Texas, the Rowe-Barr Collection was assembled and donated to SMU’s DeGolyer Library by John N. Rowe III and B. B. Barr, brothers-in-law, business partners, and avid numismatists with differing collecting interests. Rowe’s portion of the collection comprising nearly 1500 examples of obsolete and canceled Texas currency produced from the 1830s to the end of the U. S. Civil War. Barr’s contribution consists of National Bank Notes dating from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. Every series of National Bank Note is represented: the origin...

From the Commodity History website : "Commodity Histories is a public forum for research postings, news and information about the history of commodities. Our aim is to raise public awareness of the rich histories and cultures of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America via their crucial role in the growing of crops and the production of commodities that have become an indispensable aspect of people’s daily lives throughout the world. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the energy that powers our modes of transport all contain complex histories that connect and open doors to a wider world. The study of commodities such as sugar or coffee, cotton or oil offers an exciting way of approaching global history by highlighting the various peoples and productions grounded in specific localities and environments. This burgeoning field has also enabled the flowering of a genuine multidisciplinarity revealing not only economic, social and political transformations, but also ecologi...

The Mobility in History Blog published its latest online exhibit People-Works: The Labor of Transport showcasing scholarly writings on topics related to the labor involved in transport such as safety regulations, the maintenance of street pavement, transportation in Ghana, and Chinese sailors. Some of the authors contributing to the online exhibit, which also contains great digital images from a variety of archives around the world, are   Kate McDonald,  Lee Vinsel,  Robin B. Williams,  Roger Turner, and  Martina Hacke.  The  Noteworthy Women exhibit  explores the role of women in banknote production in England where women participated in the design and production of banknotes since the early nineteenth century. The collection also tells the story behind the female portraits that have appeared in banknotes since 1975.  Images retrieved from https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/museum/noteworthy-women and.co.uk/mus...

For those of you not familiar with the BHC website , or who check it only for annual meeting updates, we'd like to remind you of some of the content available. Since taking over in 2015 as editor for teaching and research resources on the website, Michael Aldous has produced several valuable conversations with business historians, from Geoff Jones on business history and emerging markets, to Sharon Murphy on the case method, to technology in the classroom with Chinmay Tumbe. The book bibliographies published here at seasonal intervals are collected on the BHC website under "Books of Interest." The full text of nearly all articles (1962-1999) published in the print editions of Business and Economic History is available on the site, as is the text of articles in the natively online version, BEH On-Line . Detailed information about past annual meetings can be found linked from our main Annual Meetings pag e. Previous programs, including a complete set, 2000-2018, a...

"Moving Beyond 'Rags to Riches' " is a website that aims to "use digital history to uncover the lost stories of New York's Irish Famine immigrants." The project was initiated by Tyler Anbinder, who enlisted Simone Wegge and Cormac Ó Gráda for their expertise. According to the site creators, We created this site to give students, scholars, and anyone interested in history access to more than 1,000 original documents chronicling the lives of New York’s pre-Civil War immigrant community. Our work focuses in particular on the “Famine Irish” who came to New York by the tens of thousands annually in the late 1840s and early 1850s. . . . We’ve chosen about 400 of these immigrants—representing a cross-section of the Irish immigrant experience—and gathered documents (including census records, ship manifests, news accounts, and even their bank records) to allow you to understand how they survived and, in many cases, ultimately thrived in America. In addition...

The Wirtschaftsarchiv-portal  (WAP) is an online directory of business archives in German-speaking countries, thus presenting German, Austrian, and Swiss business archives together. The portal provides contact details for company and business archives and an overview of their historical sources. Although the site is in German, searches are easy with a basic vocabulary. And if one knows the name of the archives, the directory provides a quick way to find a basic description of the institution's holdings and contact information.      The WAP is supported by the Society for Business History (Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte), the Association of German Business Archivists (Vereinigung deutscher Wirtschaftsarchivare), and the Institute for Bank-Historical Research (Institut für bankhistorische Forschung).

A few recent articles of interest to business and economic historians published in blogs: On the American Philosophical Society blog, Cynthia Heider writes about "Indenture Mining: Making Pre-Industrial Tradeswomen Visible" (part 1, with part 2 to come shortly) A recent post on the Library of Congress's "Inside Adams" blog discusses the history of quantitative graphics in "Historical Business & Economics Charts and Graphs." On the National Archives blog "The Text Message," Elise Fariello writes at length about the usefulness of "Tax Assessment Lists of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries." On the "Organizational History Network," Peter Miskell recaps his ABH talk on "The Content & Practice of Business History" An early July installment of JSTOR Daily delves into  "The Massive Fight over Sunday Mail," using a 1990 Richard R. John article as its source. On SHEAR's "Panor...

The "Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain" project has created a searchable database of well over eight hundred newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. Many were of African descent, though a small number were from the Indian sub-continent and a few were Indigenous Americans. The principal sources for this project are English and Scottish newspapers published between 1700 and 1780. Although some have been digitized, the poor quality of surviving newsprint makes digital text searching unreliable, so project researchers have surveyed thousands of newspaper issues in archives all over Britain, some in their original print form as well as many more on microfilm or digital form. The database contains full transcriptions of the advertisements, and when possible photographic reproductions.      The project is a product of the Department of History at the University of Glasgow, h...

Readers who have not visited the "Who Makes Cents?" podcast site for some time will find a number of interviews of interest; for example, Joshua Clark Davis on activist business in the 1960s and 1970s Bryant Simon on the Hamlet fire and the politics of chicken Mehrsa Baradaran on her recent book about the history of the racial wealth gap and the role of black banks Kim Phillips-Fein on fiscal crisis and austerity politics in New York City Christy Chapin on the centrality of insurance companies to American health care LaShawn Harris on black women and the informal economy Daniel Amsterdam on the business campaign to expand government spending Eric Rauchway on how FDR and Keynes ended the Depression Beginning in April 2018, new episodes are also available on the Verso blog .

The "Transcontinental Railroad" website was created by the Linda Hall Library with support from the BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) Foundation. It offers visitors a brief history of the building of the transcontinental railroad, as well as general information on the history and technology of nineteenth-century railroads. Most important, it offers full text access to the Linda Hall Library’s extensive collection of nineteenth-century railroad periodicals .     Check here for more digital exhibits from the Linda Hall Library, which specializes in materials related to science, engineering, and technology.

The Federico-Tena World Trade Historical Database : "The available series of world trade covered mostly the advanced world and were hopelessly outdated as they did not take into account all the research on foreign trade of the last thirty years. In contrast, our data-set uses all the most recent research we are aware of and covers almost all polities (independent countries and colonies) in the world after 1850, with few . . . exceptions. . . . For each polity we estimate series of imports and exports at current and constant prices (in 1913 dollars), both at current and 1913 borders." The data are free to use with attribution; the compilers will continue to update the series. Measuring Worth [from Samuel H. Williamson]: "There are two missions of this site. The first is to make available to the public the highest quality and most reliable historical data on important economic aggregates, with particular emphasis on nominal (current-price) measures, as well as real (...

An announcement from the Newberry Library in Chicago: Now anyone with an Internet connection can access over 200,000 high-resolution images from a range of primary sources—maps, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, photographs, and artwork—documenting Europeans’ evolving conception of the Americas, early contact between colonial forces and Indigenous peoples, the expanding boundaries of the United States, and the imaginary construction of “the West.” These images come from the Edward E. Ayer Collection , one of the strongest collections regarding American Indian history and culture in the world; and the Everett D. Graff Collection , a substantial aggregation of Western Americana that ranks among the most extensive in the country. Of special interest to business historians is the large number of business directories, trade cards, receipts, account books, and merchant advertisements one can find among the items in the Graff Collection. The Ayer Collection holds fascinating items such as...

The Newberry Library in Chicago has announced a major revision to its policy regarding the re-use of collection images: "images derived from collection items are now available to anyone for any lawful purpose, whether commercial or non-commercial, without licensing or permission fees to the library." (Note, however, that "users remain responsible for determining whether material is in the public domain, whether it is protected by copyright law or other restrictions, or whether a particular activity constitutes fair use.")      This news should encourage researchers to explore the 1.7 million high-resolution Newberry images currently available online .  One place to start is the digital exhibit, "CB&Q: Building an Empire."  Additional CB&Q materials are available at the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) site, where one will find "Daily Life along the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy Railroad," based on...