The Exchange

Visit the new online exhibit “Photography and Corporate Public Relations: The Case of U.S. Steel, 1930 – 1960” on the  Baker Library, Bloomberg Center, Harvard Business School,  website: https://www.library.hbs.edu/us-steel From 1930 to 1960, the United States Steel Corporation commissioned photographers around the country to document the inner workings of the company and its subsidiaries as part of a national public relations campaign. These efforts occurred at a time when the steel industry, like today’s technology behemoths, reigned central in the world economy. From the Great Depression to the war years to the post-war boom, photography served as a persuasive tool in PR campaigns focused on promoting good will and a favorable attitude about policies concerning the corporation’s size, labor practices, and profit margins. Drawing from the United States Steel Corporation Photographs collection at Baker Library, the exhibition features striking images of steel worke...

The Smithsonian Institution has launched a new exhibition titled "Cultivating America's Gardens," which will run in its physical form through August 2018. In addition to displaying many beautiful images, the online component of the exhibition has a section called  "Gardening as Enterprise."  The segment covers selling seeds and plant breeding and features many illustrations of seed catalogs and trade cards.     Those with a special interest in this topic might also take a look at the Smithsonian's main seed and nursery catalog site , as well as its "American Seed and Nursery Industry" page , which provides bibliographies and biographical information about many in that industry.

Folks planning to attend the upcoming BHC meeting in Denver, Colorado, should be aware of  opportunities offered by the Telecommunications History Group (THG), a nonprofit organization with the mission of promoting a broad humanistic understanding of telecommunications in history. The group holds an extensive archive in its Denver headquarters of photographs, telephone directories, and historic documents related to the history of telecommunications, especially in the West.     The facility, located at 1425 Champa, only a few blocks from the BHC conference hotel, will be available on Thursday, March 30, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., especially for BHC attendees. Those interested in visiting the THG will need an appointment to enter the building. For information and an appointment, please contact Jody Georgeson, Archivist, and Lisa Berquist, THG Director, at telcomhist@aol.com . An overview of the THG's collections is available on the group's website.   ...

The previously announced "American Enterprise" exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) opened on July 1. Primarily a physical exhibition, it also has a web component featuring specific essays and numerous illustrations. Moving from the "Merchant Era," to the "Corporate Era," to the "Consumer Era," to the "Global Era," the exhibition "chronicles the tumultuous interaction of capitalism and democracy that resulted in the continual remaking of American business—and American life." Readers interested in the background of the exhibition can read a discussion with the exhibition project director David Allison and also see the press release .    The exhibition website also features a Flickr section of large-scale photographs of the physical exhibition. The curators have published an accompanying book, American Enterprise , from Smithsonian Books (with an excerpt available).

The "Places of Invention" exhibition will open on July 1, 2015 at the Smithsonian Museum's Lemelson Center for the Study of Innovation and Invention in Washington, DC. According to the website, "the exhibition will take visitors on a journey through time and place to meet people who lived, worked, played, collaborated, adapted, took risks, solved problems, and sometimes failed—all in the pursuit of something new." The physical exhibit will feature six communities: Silicon Valley, 1970-80s; the Bronx, 1970s; Medical Alley, 1950s; Hartford, late 1800s; Hollywood, 1930s; and Fort Collins, 2010. The accompanying website includes an interactive map detailing many more "places of invention," with their accompanying stories.This is an ongoing project, with more materials to be added to the online version over time.

America on the Move is a physical exhibit at the National Museum of American History with a strong online component. The Museum’s online transportation collection includes more than a thousand artifacts and photographs. The web version of the exhibit provides numerous ways to explore the material, including a chronologically divided set of sections spamming times pre-1876 through 2000. In addition to the visual materials, there are a number of thematic "stories," featuring many essays divided into topics such as "work and lesiure," "technology," and "immigration." The site also includes a list of learning resources such as self-guided tours, a "classroom activity guide," a reading list, and a list of other web links.

The exhibit "Show Me The Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present" has opened at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland, UK. The exhibit charts how the financial world has been imagined in art, illustration, photography and other visual media over the last three centuries in Britain and the United States. The exhibition shows how artists have grappled with the increasingly intangible nature of money and finance from the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century to the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. . . . As well as works in an array of media, the exhibition also reveals the development of an array of financial visualisations, including stock tickers and charts, newspaper illustrations, bank adverts and electronic trading systems.     This is primarily a physical exhibit, but the accompanying website has many images and a good deal of explanatory text. The exhibit will travel to other venues in the UK; please see th...

As reported here two years ago, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is planning a new exhibition, American Enterprise , which will open in the spring of 2015 (moved back from 2014). The exhibition will focus primarily on stories from five economic sectors: agriculture, finance, information and communication technology, manufacturing, and retail/service. In conjunction with the physical exhibit, the NMAH created a website to track the exhibit's progress and to allow public interaction with the curators. Readers can learn about additions to the exhibit and read articles by following the project's blog . Posts include an article on pawning by Wendy Woloson; on Alfred Bloomingdale's cartoon collection by Robin Einhorn; a series of posts (generated by Steven Lubar's class at Brown University) on the significance of business board games ; on the making of Labor Day by Paul Buhle; and on the business of philanthropy by Amanda Moniz. Interested reader...

Baker Library Historical Collections has mounted a new exhibit, “Building the Foundation: Business Education for Women at Harvard University, 1937–1970.” The exhibition will run until September 22, 2013, at Baker Library, Harvard Business School. Illustrating the evolution of this formative period are photographs, interviews, reports, and correspondence from Baker Library Historical Collections at Harvard Business School and from the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute.     “Building the Foundation” traces the early history of business education for women at Harvard University from the founding of the one-year certificate program at Radcliffe College in 1937 (which HBS Professor Fritz Roethlisberger called “the first daring experiment in ‘practical education’ for women”) to the HBS faculty vote to admit women into the two-year MBA program, and finally to the complete integration of women into HBS campus life by 1970. The ...

"Mind Your Business: Records of Early American Commerce at the John Carter Library" has just launched; the physical exhibit will run from September through December 2012, and there is also a rich accompanying website. As the Introduction explains: This exhibition explores what it took to “mind” one’s business in the 18th and early 19th centuries. During that period, literacy and numeracy became critical skills for merchants and traders, and sophisticated methods of recording and analyzing transactions and investments enabled companies to more efficiently strategize their use of capital. Beyond being a boon to historical research, these accumulations of paper generated by clerks, bookkeepers and accountants did, indeed, make money. The exhibit was prepared by Kim Nusco, Reference and Manuscript Librarian, John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. The Web version contains well-illustrated and narrated sections on "Forming the Man of Business,...

Those close to New York City and environs might wish to take advantage of a program on Monday, June 25, at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). Entitled "Booms, Bubbles, and Busts: Spectacular Moments in New York's Banking History," the conversation will be moderated by Mark Gongloff, chief financial writer of the Huffington Post, and will feature historians Steven Fraser, Columbia University, author of Every Man a Speculator (HarperCollins, 2005); Julia Ott, The New School, author of When Wall Street Met Main Street (Harvard University Press, 2011) and Robert E. Wright, Augustana College, author of One Nation Under Debt (McGraw-Hill 2008). According to the press release, "The history of Wall Street is a series of speculative ups and crashing downs. The panel will explore the cyclical nature of New York’s economic history through dramatic events and reappearing themes, and extract lessons for the present and the future."    The session will begin at 6...

The National Museum of American History is planning a new exhibition for 2015 (originally scheduled for 2014) that will explore a key area of the American experience—the history of business and innovation. Entitled American Enterprise , the exhibition will "look at how the United States developed from a loosely integrated set of colonies and frontier people to the most influential national economy in the world. It will present the benefits, failures, and unanticipated consequences of the nation’s business development. The central theme of the exhibition will be the American marketplace–the dynamic interplay of consumers and producers." The curators of the exhibit have established a website that will open the research and exhibition process to the public. Through regular blog posts readers will "learn about research trips and the issues and artifacts that the team is considering. . . . The museum is looking for interesting ideas about new artifacts to collect, topics...

The company founded by Josiah Wedgwood was merged with Waterford in 1986, and then "fell into administration" in 2009. A High Court judge in the UK ruled on December 19, 2011, that the Wedgwood Museum's 10,000-piece collection of  fine pottery is not held in trust, and so can be sold to pay off a claim by the Pension Protection Fund (PPF).  New pensions legislation holds any solvent organization liable for the entire debt of a pension fund if any of its employees are in that pension fund; the museum has five eligible employees. The government has just announced that it sees no legal ground on which to appeal the ruling, creating a firestorm of negative reaction. It is hoped that private or public benefactors will be found to prevent the collection's being broken up and to keep it available for public display.     Andrew Popp , John Wilson , and Robin Holt of the University of Liverpool School of Management have written in opposition to the sale of...

Detail from Marinus van Reymerswaele, "The Usurers," c. 1540 Readers may be interested in an exhibit that opened in September at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, "Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli, and the Bonfire of the Vanities." The exhibit "recounts the birth of our modern banking system and of the economic boom that it triggered, providing a reconstruction of European life and the continent's economy from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance." For those fortunate enough to be in Florence soon, the exhibit runs through January 22, 2012; others can read more about the exhibit and see examples of the artwork on a number of sites, in addition to the "exhibition walkthrough" material on the Palazzo Strozzi exhibition pages: The Economist , "The Benefits of Early Money-Laundering" The Wall Street Journal , "For the Love of Money: The Birth of Modern Banking and the Art That Made It Possible" Medievalists.net ...

From April 1 to July 31, 2011, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be hosting an exhibition entitled  "Health for Sale: Posters from the William H. Helfand Collection." Several of the images are available for viewing on-line at the PMA website. This exhibition presents some fifty of the nearly two hundred posters in this collection, only a small fraction of the materials Helfand, a former Merck executive, has collected. The posters address a wide range of topics, such as promoting hygiene, announcing medical conferences, and advertising miracle cures. An extended interview with Helfand can be found at the Design Observer , which also includes selected images. An exhibition catalog has been published by Yale University Press.    Other useful sources for medical images, not limited to posters, include the Wellcome Library in London and the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. Such materials are of interest to business historians because details of the...

The Smithsonian Institution is planning a new exhibit focusing on "American Enterprise" and has issued a call for public involvement; the curators are seeking "interesting ideas about new artifacts to collect, topics to pursue, [and] related personal experiences."  The target opening date is 2014. The announcement states, The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is planning a new long-term exhibition that will explore a key area of the American experience—the history of business and innovation. “American Enterprise” is the working title for the exhibition, which will trace the development of the United States from a largely dependent territory to the largest national economy in the world (1750s–2010s). The central goal of the exhibition is an understanding of the American business history story focusing on opportunity, competition and innovation in the American marketplace— the dynamic interplay of consumers and producers. The museum is work...

Harper's Weekly , Sept. 7, 1867 Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, announces the opening of a new exhibition, “Buy Now, Pay Later: A History of Personal Credit.” The exhibit will run from October 22, 2010, through June 3, 2011, in the North Lobby, Baker Library | Bloomberg Center, Harvard Business School. The physical exhibit is accompanied by on-line examples and resources . “Buy Now, Pay Later: A History of Personal Credit” demonstrates that, although the instruments and institutions of twenty-first century credit—the installment plan, the credit card, and the home finance industry—are less than a century old, credit itself is as old as commerce. The exhibition draws from Baker Library’s Historical Collections materials to show how previous generations devised creative ways of lending and borrowing long before credit cards or mortgage backed securities. Please contact Baker Library Historical Collections to request a copy of the exh...

Detail from Czechoslovakia, 50 korun, 1929 (front). Designed by Alfons Mucha, engraved by Karel Wolf. Collection of Vsevolod Onyshkevych. (Princeton University Numismatic Collection) Those planning to be in the Princeton area this year might want to visit the new exhibit from the Princeton University Numismatics Collection, housed in the Rare Books and Special Collections Department of the Firestone Library. "Money on Paper: Bank Notes and Related Graphic Arts" will run from August 30, 2010, through January 2, 2011. In the words of the exhibit announcement, "Bank notes . . . have constituted one of the dominant forms of visual communication for the past two centuries, and in many cases can be seen as works of art in their own right." In addition to information provided on the exhibit website, more analysis can be found in Princeton's news release for the exhibit's opening. For those interested in the history of currency and coins, several webs...