The Exchange

The 17th annual conference of the European Business History Association (EBHA) will take place on August 22-24, 2013, in Uppsala (Sweden), with the cooperation of the Uppsala Centre for Business History . The conference theme will be "Innovation and Growth." According to the call for papers , Technical, financial and organizational innovations have all been important drivers of growth. From a global perspective, the interaction between enterprises, innovations and growth has been central in the process of economic growth during three industrial revolutions. European historical experiences also give us insights into these complex relationships on a national, regional and local basis. . . .  As its main theme, this congress will identify the interrelationship between growth and innovation. It is obvious that innovations can result in economic growth. But also, since innovations often lead to changing economic and social structures, they may have a destabilizing effect as wel...

The Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, has announced a conference on "Business and Politics in 20th-Century America," to be held November 8, 2013. Herewith the full call for papers:     Over the past ten years there has been a surge of new scholarship on the relationship between business and American politics in the twentieth century. Much of this work examines the efforts by business and business people to influence politics, often in response to the growth of the American federal government that began with the Progressive Era and continued with the mid-century New Deal. Many of these finely grained studies draw on, and continue to use, the collections in the Hagley Library. It is fitting, then, to invite scholars working on this topic to come to Hagley to assess the state of knowledge, and discuss new work emerging from research. We are especially interested in papers that address some of the following questions:     As the spectrum of go...

The tenth European Historical Economics Society (EHES) Conference will be held at the London School of Economics on  September 6-7, 2013. The Conference program committee, consisting of Stephen Broadberry (London School of Economics), Herman de Jong (University of Groningen), Giovanni Federico (European University Institute), and Sybille Lehmann (Hohenheim University), has issued a call for papers inviting proposals for individual papers on any aspect of European or global economic history covering a wide range of periods, countries and regions. The Society encourages submissions from young scholars and will provide ten grants of €500 each to help Ph.D. students cover the costs of travel and accommodation. Further details are available on the EHES website .     For each proposed paper, an abstract not exceeding 500 words together with the institutional affiliation and e-mail address of the authors should be uploaded by February 6, 2013 , via the Society’s website...

The Lemelson Center Fellowship and Travel Award programs support projects that present creative approaches to the study of invention and innovation in American society. These include, but are not limited to, historical research and documentation projects resulting in dissertations, theses, publications, exhibitions, educational initiatives, documentary films, or other multimedia products. The programs provide access to the expertise of the Institution's research staff and the vast invention and technology collections of the National Museum of American History (NMAH). The NMAH Archives Center documents both individuals and firms across a range of time periods and subject areas. Representative collections include the Western Union Telegraph Company Records, ca. 1840-1994 and the Earl S. Tupper Papers, documenting Tupper, and his invention, Tupperware. In addition, the NMAH Library offers long runs of historical technology serials like Scientific American and American Ma...

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...

The Académie François Bourdon , in cooperation with the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Dijon, is in the process of making a large portion of its Schneider et Cie Archives (covering the period 1837-1966) accessible on-line. A major section of the archives involves thousands of documents, drawings, and photographs (100,000 pages, 650 plans, and 800 photos, according to AFB director Ivan Kharaba ) from the company's files during the First World War, 1914-1918. In addition, all the company minutes from 1840 to 1965 are now freely available.   Material is divided into categories :  documents, photographs, and plans. The various categories suggested to researchers are still incomplete; the fields will be progressively refined and populated as the work of cataloging and digitization continues. Additional resources will be made available as they are completed, including a segment focused on the records of factory workers.

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) will hold its 2014 annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 10-13. The theme of the meeting will be "Crossing Borders." As described in the call for papers : The history of the United States is a product of migrations–internal and international. Along with people, goods and ideas crossed these borders, reshaping the composition and character of the American people. Sometimes the borders and boundaries were physical, as when international migrants crossed oceans and continents, or when large numbers of individuals migrated from one region of the country to another, or when the lure of wealth and influence led to foreign invasions and conquests. Those on the move were accompanied by bacteria or viruses, microorganisms whose migration across borders also shaped human experience. Borders were also framed by culture–racial, ethnic, class, and gender differences that perennially redefined our population and social order. The th...