The Exchange

The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing invites submissions for a special issue focused on “Italian Marketing History,” to be guest edited by Jonathan Morris. The call for papers states: Several overarching themes are planned including historical studies of marketing within Italy and the ways in which Italy has been marketed beyond the country’s borders, the emergence of new distribution channels, the adaptation of marketing strategies imported from abroad, the ‘economic miracle’ of the late 1950s and subsequent affluence of the 1960s, the development of new consumer identities amongst women and youth, elite and mass tourism, and  the centuries-long marketing history of the Italian luxury industries such as fashion, furniture, and food. Please see the full call for papers for additional details. The deadline for submissions is August 1, 2013 .

The October 2011 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era devotes itself to booms and busts in the Gilded Age, particularly the Panic of 1873, which the editor characterizes as perhaps "the least understood major episode in the history of American political economy." For a brief period, all the articles are freely available from the journal's website. Contents include: Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Introduction: Reflecting on History when Markets Tumble" Nicolas Barreyre, "The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics" Scott Reynolds Nelson, "A Financial Crisis in Prints and Cartoons" Jonathan Levy, "The Freaks of Fortune: Moral Responsibility for Booms and Busts in Nineteenth-Century America" Scott Reynolds Nelson, "A Storm of Cheap Goods: New American Commodities and the Panic of 1873" Andrew Zimmerman, "Cotton Booms, Co...

The annual Cliometric Society conference in 2012 will be held on the weekend of Friday, May 18 through Sunday, May 20 at Westward Look, Tucson, Arizona, and hosted by the University of Arizona and the National Science Foundation.    The conference is designed to provide extensive discussion of new and innovative research in economic history. The papers selected for presentation and discussion are sent out to all conference participants in advance. All participants are required to read all papers and to attend the entire conference. At least one author must be a member of the Cliometric Society. For membership information contact Michael Haupert .    The deadline to submit a paper proposal or a request to attend the conference is January 18,  2012 . Interdisciplinary proposals and participants are strongly encouraged. Those wishing to present a paper should provide an abstract and a 3-5 page summary of the proposed paper. In choosing papers and participants,...

A few weeks ago, we mentioned the Echoes blog at Bloomberg.com, which Stephen Mihm of the University of Georgia has retooled to "unearth parallels between past and present, highlighting how the economic crises of our own era are perhaps not as unique as we think." Since its revamping, the blog has published numerous essays by members of the business history community, including: Sean Vanatta , "How the Insurance Industry Tried to Ban Christmas" Leslie Berlin , "When Steve Jobs Was a 'Joker' " Louis Hyman , "How Did World War II End the Great Depression?" Terri Lonier , "The Accident That Started the Breakfast Cereal Business" Jeffrey Fear , "The Long Shadow of German Hyperinflation Roger Horowitz , "Commemorating the Ford Edsel's Historically Bad Launch Among many other contributors familiar to business historians are Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Peter Coclanis, Steve Fraser, Marc Levinson, and Robert E. Wright...

The Centre for Business History at Copenhagen Business School is hosting a workshop on January 12-13, 2012, on "The Invention of Choice: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on Markets, Democracy, and Power." As organizer Stefan Schwarzkopf explains, The aim of the workshop is to problematize the notion of “choice” from various historical and theoretical perspectives. Rather than asking whether or not more (or less) choice per se is either good or bad for citizens and consumers—a perspective that dominates much of the discussion in marketing, consumer psychology, behavioural economics etc.—we want to use this workshop to exchange ideas about the historical, cultural and political circumstances that led to the reification of choice as a social policy aim in its own right.    The full program is available here .    Registration is via email to Stefan Schwarzkopf ; the deadline is January 6, 2012 .

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton University Press, 2011), by Louis Hyman , has been listed as one of Choice's top 25 academic books of the year. Readers can find on-line reviews of the book here and here . Hyman discusses the book in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review and can be heard discussing it with Marshall Poe at "New Books in History." He also contributed a comment to the Page 99 Test . Hyman is currently an assistant professor in the Labor Relations, Law, and History department at the ILR school of Cornell University. In 2008, he won the Business History Conference's Herman Krooss Prize for the best dissertation presented at the BHC annual meeting; his thesis was entitled "Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America."

The International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society will hold its next biennial conference at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, on July 2-5, 2012. The theme of the meeting will be "Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Competitive Processes in Complex Economic Systems." According to the call for papers: Although the Conference is open to submissions in all areas of evolutionary economics, the Scientific Committee would like to encourage submissions in six priority areas: Evolutionary perspectives on the causes and consequences of high economic growth in Asian economies The role of energy and other natural resources in economic evolution Understanding and achieving environmental sustainability using evolutionary economic analysis The role of intellectual property in driving innovation in the new media Long waves, finance and global crises Productivity growth and structural change All paper proposals and abstracts must be submitted on-line thro...