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Winter Edition: Business Historians in the News

Links to business and economic historians in the news:
The PBS "American Experience" episode on the Gilded Age features many scholars from the business history community: among others, Steve Fraser, Susie Pak, Richard John, Julia Ott, Noam Maggor, and Richard White. For the transcript of historians' commentary, see here.

A Boston Review forum titled "To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice" features an essay by Walter Johnson and several responses from a number of historians, including Caitlin Rosenthal, who asks "How does the history of slavery look if we make more use of the language of capitalism?" The entire forum is open access.

In a recent essay for the "Humanities Moments" blog of the National Humanities Center, Edward J. Balleisen writes about "Story-Making and the Fault Lines of American Capitalism."

In a contribution to Bloomberg View, Stephen Mihm discusses toll roads: "Privatizing Roads Was a Great Idea. Not Anymore."

For the Washington Post's "Made by History" series, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer considers "The Toxic Practice Fueling the Fierce Competition over Amazon's Headquarters." [Note: these essays are behind a paywall, but the list of essays in the series is open.]

And in another Washington Post entry, Benjamin Waterhouse has just published a review of Adam Winkler's We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights (Norton, 2018).

On the "History of Knowledge" blog, Josh Lauer writes about "Economic Personae: The Making of Financial Identity in America."

In a post on The Atlantic website, Joshua Clark Davis looks at "The FBI's War on Black-Owned Bookstores."

Also on The Atlantic site, "How 'Citizen Housewives' Made Food Cheaper and Safer," an interview with Emily Twarog, author of Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Commemorating Alexander Hamilton's birthday at the Museum of American Finance, Richard Sylla discusses "Alexander Hamilton and Fiscal Responsibility" on C-Span.

"The Hemmings Daily" (a classic car blog) excerpted a section of Katherine Parkin's Women at the Wheel: A Century of Buying, Driving, and Fixing Cars (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). The book won the Popular Culture Association's Emily Toth Award for the best single work in Women's Studies in 2017.

An "Atlas Obscura" article on "Finding the Unexpected Wonder in More Than 22,000 International Standards" quotes Craig Murphy, who adds information from his and Joanne Yates' The International Organization for Standardization (ISO): Global Governance Through Voluntary Consensus (Routledge, 2009) and their ongoing research.

Last fall, Louis Hyman spoke to policymakers in Washington, D.C., in a briefing sponsored by the National History Center. The session focused on "how technological innovation is transforming work, and how insights from the past inform responses to the 21st-century wave of automation." The briefing is now available on C-Span.

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