Skip to main content

Over the Counter: Issue No. 34


Items of interest from around the web:
The corporate archives of Woolworth's UK have been donated to the University of Reading Archives at the University's Museum of English Rural Life (MERL). Following preservation work and cataloguing, the collection will soon be accessible to researchers.

The 99% Invisible website recently featured an article on "Machines for Living In: How Technology Shaped a Century of Interior Design."

The Harvard Business Review has posted "When America Was Most Innovative and Why," by Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, and Tom Nicholas.

In other HBS faculty news, there is an interesting interview in the Harvard Gazette with David Moss about his new book, Democracy: A Case Study (Harvard University Press), which uses the case method to chart the development of American democracy; many of the nineteen cases relate directly to business history.

And "Live Mint" has an interview with Geoffrey Jones of HBS on "a second wave of deglobalization."

Further on globalization, Jeremy Adelman of Princeton University has an extended essay on "Aeon" about the historiography and future of global history: "What is global history now?

Two posts of interest from "The Conversation": "Women were to blame for the south sea bubble--according to men," by Anne Murphy; and "No, the black death did not create more jobs for women," by Jane Humphreys.

The EHS blog, "The Long Run," has accumulated a number of interesting essays. 

Heidi Tworek, Richard John, Michael Stamm, and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb were among the participants at the recent Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference held at New York University. Details of the closing panel, featuring Tworek, John, Stamm, and Silberstein-Loeb, are highlighted here; Stamm also presented the keynote speech.

Richard John also spoke recently to the Forbes staff about the history of American capitalism. He has posted the slides from that talk online. 

The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy has announced that Laura Phillips Sawyer of the Harvard Business School has been selected to receive the 2016 Glenn Sonnedecker Prize for her article, “California Fair Trade: Antitrust and the Politics of 'Fairness' in U.S. Competition Policy” (Business History Review, 2015). The Sonnedecker Prize is awarded annually for the best original article published on the history of some facet of pharmacy practice or pharmacy education in the United States.

Nancy Tomes, professor at Stony Brook University, is one of the winners of the Bancroft Prize for Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients Into Consumers (University of North Carolina Press), which examines the origins of the notion that patients should “shop” for health care.

The University of Toronto Press Journals blog has published an interview with Nicole St-Onge about her essay " 'He was neither a soldier nor a slave: he was under the control of no man': Kahnawake Mohawks in the Northwest Fur Trade, 1790-1850," which appeared in the Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes D’Histoire in 2016; the article is available here ungated, for a very limited time.

Liz Daly's "Culture Digest" looks at the new exhibit at the Museum of American Finance, "For the Love of Money: Blacks on US Currency"; a brief online view of the exhibit is here.

Andrew Hartman of Illinois State University posted the reading list for his "History of Capitalism" course on the U.S. Intellectual History blog; see also the comments offering additions.

The Panorama, the blog for the Journal of the Early Republic, published for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), has two essays of particular interest: one by John Lauritz Larson, on "On Cat's Paws: Teaching the Emergence of Capitalism in American History," and another by Ellen Hartigan O'Connor, on "Teaching Gender's Value.":

An exhibition of interest at the Musee du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac in Paris: "L'Afrique des Routes," which offers a new approach to the role of the African continent in international trade and cultural exchanges through more than 350 objects (scroll down to see some illustrations). A brief overview in English is here; the accompanying exhibition catalog is here.


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

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

New resource available: Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography

Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography The Business History Conference is working to facilitate the creation of a bibliography of scholarly work on race and business history. We hope that the bibliography will serve as a resource for those seeking to create more inclusive syllabi and understand the historical context for our present moment of reckoning with structural racism in the United States and across the globe. The bibliography is crowdsourced and draws on the collective expertise of the BHC membership. The BHC wishes to expand the list of references already curated and invites your contributions to the bibliography (The current list of references contains 154 titles). Submit your 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-Fernandez <padelacruzf at gmail.com>, (b) tweeting titles to @TheBHCNews or (c) adding it