The annual meeting of the Economic History Association (EHA) will be held this year in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 9-11; the theme of the meeting is "Crises and Turning Points." The full meeting brochure , containing information about travel, accommodations, and the preliminary program, has now been posted. An on-line registration form will be available later this week; the pre-registration deadline is August 15, 2011. All inquiries about the EHA 2011 meeting should be directed to the Meetings Coordinator, Jari Eloranta, by email (elorantaj@appstate.edu) or phone (828-262-6006).

Good news for business historians, as Ontario-based Labatt Breweries announced that it had given a major portion of its corporate archives to the University of Western Ontario, where the collection will be organized and maintained by the university's Archives and Research Collection Centre. Even more promising, the company also donated $200,000 to the university toward digitizing the collection. In the words of the press release:

Until four years ago, the material Labatt had gathered since its founding – along with other materials acquired as a result of acquisitions of smaller Canadian breweries over the years – resided in thousands upon thousands of boxes, drawers and filing cabinets across the country. Amongst some of the collection, the artifacts include John Labatt’s personal letter book (1883-1906) containing company correspondence; a brewery book (1884-1895) providing details of daily production and year-end summaries; a stereoscopic slide viewer (1950s) used to train staff to identify aluminum can defects; draft minutes of the first Board of Directors meeting (1911); and the certificate of registration of the ‘Blue’ trademark. . . . The company, along with professional archivists, gathered, catalogued, itemized and organized virtually all its irreplaceable corporate documents.

Some of the materials, including images and TV and radio commercials, are available on the Labatt site. UWO has also placed some images on Flickr.

Tip of the hat to Andrew Smith.

The 2011 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women will meet June 9-12, 2011, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This year's theme is “Generations: Exploring Race, Sexuality, and Labor across Time and Space.” The full program, which is now available on the conference web site, contains a number of sessions of interest to BHC members. Of most direct interest is Session 176, “Managing Women: The Challenges of Iintertwining Gender and Business History”; the full panel contains:

Facilitator: Angel Kwolek-Folland, University of Florida
Susan Yohn, Hofstra University
   Diversity as a Business Strategy (or How Liberal Feminism Saved American Capitalism in the Late 20th Century)
Nancy Marie Robertson, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis
   The Invisible Hand and the Velvet Glove: Women’s Departments in American Banks
Amy Froide, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
   The Business of Investing: The Public Stock Portfolios of Female Investors in 18th-Century Britain
Tanya Roth, Washington University in St. Louis
   (Un)Equal Opportunity? The Paradox of Equal Opportunity in the Cold War Military
Pamela Walker Laird, University of Colorado Denver
   The Limitations of Equal Opportunity Laws
Elizabeth Brake, Duke University
   Re-Imagining the Family Farm: New Roles and Old Limitations for Women in Industrial Agriculture
Sara Alpern, Texas A&M University, College Station
   A Businesswoman against Businesswoman: The Paradox of Alice Foote MacDougall
Nikki Mandell, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater
    Can Women Be Businessmen?
Sara Damiano, Johns Hopkins University
   “To Well and Truly Administer”: Female Administrators and Estate Settlement in Newport, RI, 1730-1776

A partial list of other sessions and papers of interest includes (session numbers in parentheses):

(1) Donica Belisle: "Professionalizing Consumption: The National Council of Women of Canada and the Formation of Modern Consumer Identities, 1893-1939"
(14) "Gender in Corporate Places," with comment by Pamela Walker Laird
(15) Roundtable: "Where Is Women's Work in Studies of Early Modern Culture, Consumption and Credit?"
(35) "Economies of Beauty: Race, Gender, and Marketplaces," chaired by Susannah Walker
(39) "Rethinking Capitalism, Work, and Gender: A Feminist Economics Roundtable," chaired by Tracey Deutsch
(58) "Women in the U.S. Corporation, 1970-1995," chaired by Vicki Howard, with Jennifer Scanlon as commentator
(59) "Consumers, Control, and Women's Economic Activity"
(128) "Cultural Currency: Women, Gender, and the Multiple Meanings of the Marketplace in the U.S., 1870-1925"
(151) Tiffany Gill: " 'Do You Have Time to Wash My Hair and Style It?' African American Beauticians and the Black Freedom Struggle"
(153) "Motherhood, Madonna and the Marketplace: Laywomen and Business Ladies across the Americas, 1750-1900," with comment by Susan Ingalls Lewis

For full information about registration, lodging, and other program events, please see the Berkshire Conference web site.

The on-line version of the June 2011 issue of Enterprise & Society is now available at the Oxford University Press journals site. Essays include:

Giovanni Favero, “Business Attitudes Toward Statistical Investigation in Late Nineteenth Century Italy: A Wool Industrialist from Reticence to Influence”
Bianca Murillo, “ ‘The Devil We Know’: Gold Coast Consumers, Local Employees, and the United Africa Company, 1940–1960”
Pierre-Yves Donzé, “The Hybrid Production System and the Birth of the Japanese Specialized Industry: Watch Production at Hattori & Co. (1900–1960)”
Neil Rollings, “Multinational Enterprise and Government Controls on Outward Foreign Direct Investment in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1960s”

Full access requires a subscription (included in BHC membership), but extracts or abstracts of all the essays and reviews are freely available on the contents page.

An interdisciplinary conference on "Immigration and Entrepreneurship" will be held in Fall 2012, cosponsored by the Center for the History of New America (University of Maryland), the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (University of Maryland), and the German Historical Institute (Washington, D.C.). Conveners are David B. Sicilia and David F. Barbe, University of Maryland, College Park, and Hartmut Berghoff, German Historical Institute and University of Göttingen. The call for papers states, in part:

The United States has long been an immigrant society as well as an entrepreneurial society. This is no coincidence: immigrants launch new enterprises and invent new technologies at rates much higher than native-born Americans. As the volume of in-migration again approaches that of the “new immigration” at the turn of the twentieth century, it is time to measure how immigrants have shaped the American economy in the past and how immigration policy reform in 1965 has fostered the transformation of business and economic life in the United States.  How have newcomers shaped and in turn been shaped by American economic life?

Proposals for papers are invited from scholars working in a variety of disciplines–including but not limited to history, sociology, economics, business administration, entrepreneurial studies, anthropology, and cultural studies. Comparative studies across time and place are especially welcomed.

The conference will engage these and related research topics:

• immigrant group styles and patterns of entrepreneurship
• immigrant entrepreneurship and U.S. economic development
• geography of ethnic entrepreneurship
• journeys of successful high-tech entrepreneurs
• immigrant entrepreneurs as small proprietors
• success and failure narratives and other discourse surrounding ethnic immigrant entrepreneurship
• barriers to immigrant entrepreneurial success
• policy implications of historical and contemporary research on immigrant entrepreneurship

For full consideration, please submit a 200-word abstract and a short c.v. to immigrantentrepreneurs@umd.edu by September 15, 2011. The full call for papers can be found on the GHI website.

The conference will take place in College Park, MD, and Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2012. Presenters will be given accommodations and a travel stipend. Selected conference presenters will be invited to publish their work in an edited scholarly volume of essays that will grow out of the conference.

Given the important relationships between business and the state (see the theme for the 2012 Business History Conference meeting), business and economic historians are often interested in political data. For the United States, more and more of this information has been digitized and is freely available on-line. 
   In 2008 the University of Richmond launched "Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008." That site uses interactive maps and county election data to allow both narrow and broad analysis of presidential elections since 1840, and also of some congressional elections. The site was redesigned and relaunched in 2011, and the project managers continue to add data and refine the presentation. (Researchers can also find county-level data for U.S. presidential and congressional elections, 1840-1972, at the ICPSR site).

   At about the same time, "A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787-1825" appeared. Presented by the American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the data is based on the work of researcher Philip J. Lampi, who has been collecting election return data for over forty years. As the project organizers explain:

When this project is complete it will include all 25 states and territories that existed at the time. Please keep in mind that this project is a work in progress. The elections for the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina and Rhode Island contain all of the data that Philip Lampi has collected and are now available in Version 1.0. All other states are still being worked on and elections will be made available as data entry is completed. . . . The data is very diverse and involves all offices from the Federal to the local levels including Presidential elections, town clerk elections and everything in between. . . . The available election returns are fully searchable by such key index points as year, geographical constituency, office, names of candidates, and party labels.

In addition to searching the database on-line, users may also download all or part of it to manipulate on their own. The project is ongoing, with just over half of Lampi's data digitized as of December 2010.

   The "New Nation Votes" information is particularly significant, because much of it previously has been so inaccessible. Before the early nineteenth century, election records were routinely destroyed, and in the new nation voting itself had none of the mechanisms of the modern era. Lampi combed thousands of newspapers, many of them held by the American Antiquarian Society, to search out and codify election data.
   An account of Philip Lampi's work and the efforts to digitize his data can be found in this issue of the NEH magazine, Humanities.

The Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Rothschild Archive, London, will jointly sponsor the twelfth annual PEAES conference, “Foreign Confidence: International Investment in North America, 1700 to 1860,” to be held October 11-12, 2012, in Philadelphia.

In addition to invited conference guests, proposals are solicited for papers on the conference theme, which is intended to encompass the varied ways that foreign networks of individuals and institutions provided funds and credit to North Americans for commerce, internal development, philanthropy, banking, and other forms of transnational investment. New research that highlights the great reach of capital and credit from Europe into North America and then out into many empires and world regions are especially welcome, as are proposals concerning, for example, the role of strategic international marriages, transnational secrecy and information sharing, the financial collaboration of families across imperial boundaries, and collaborative and competitive lending by individuals and early banks across national boundaries. We also encourage proposals from scholars of banking practices pioneered by the Rothschilds, Baring Bros., Hope & Co., and other institutions that had an impact on early North American development.  Papers reflecting on the rich international archives that illuminate transnational investing relationships are also welcome.

Proposals of two to three pages, accompanied by a brief CV, should be submitted as a single PDF file no later than September 1, 2011, to Cathy Matson, PEAES director, at cmatson@udel.edu. Notices of acceptance will be sent out by November 1, 2011; all presenters will submit completed papers of 30 to 35 pages by September 10, 2012.  Papers will be pre-circulated to conference registrants.

Update: The full call for papers is now available on the PEAES website.

The April 2011 issue of the American Historical Association's magazine, Perspectives, is now freely available to members and non-members alike. The issue contains a forum on "The Art of the Article," featuring several authors well-known to the Business History Conference: Aaron Marrs, Peter Coclanis, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, as well as Catherine E. Kelly, editor of Common-Place. Also of interest are an essay on Oliver Stone's Wall Street films by Joyce Appleby and one by Jonathan Rees updating his earlier article on teaching history with YouTube.
   The AHA makes available the full contents of each issue of Perspectives one month after publication.

Women in Technological History (WITH), a Special Interest Group of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), announces the availability of its travel awards for 2011. The purpose of the award is to encourage participation of “new voices” at the SHOT annual meeting. WITH invites applications from scholars presenting topics or perspectives underrepresented in SHOT as well as from individuals who can contribute to the annual meeting’s geographic and cultural diversity.
   The SHOT 2011 meeting will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, November 3-6, 2011. This year the meeting will be co-located with the annual meetings of the History of Science Society and the Society for Social Studies of Science.
   The WITH Travel Award is open to individuals who are giving a paper at the SHOT annual meeting. Priority for the WITH award will go to: 1) a scholar or graduate student new to SHOT belonging to a group underrepresented in SHOT, whose paper addresses issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and/or difference in the history of technology; 2) a non-US, non-Western graduate student or scholar new to SHOT presenting on any topic.
   Application deadline for the WITH Travel Award is June 15, 2011. For more information and the application form, see the WITH homepage or contact Susan Schmidt Horning, chair of the award committee, at schmidts@stjohns.edu.

Followers of the BHC, which as an organization embraces scholars in both history and economics departments (as well as those in business schools, public policy venues, and many others), may find  interesting a post and follow-up discussion by David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, over at the Legal History Blog. In the original post, titled "How Historians Can Benefit from Economics," Bernstein wrote,

. . . historians could benefit from economics in two ways. First, economists are very good at defining their terms, something that seems to me to be a weakness among many historians. . . . A lack of precision isn’t conducive to good history writing. Second, economics can help historians find interesting topics to research. Consider “company towns.” Standard histories assert that large mining and other companies exploited . . .  workers by forcing them to live in company housing and buy from company stores. But when an economist reads about company towns, an obvious question arises: if the companies were simply out to exploit their workers, who lacked the bargaining power to resist, why not just pay them less? A mining company has no particular expertise in running a housing market, or a store; it would be much easier, and more profitable, to simply offer lower wages and let the workers fend for themselves. But economics teaches us that companies aren’t likely to do something that’s contrary to self-interest, so that leaves several possibilities to be investigated by historians.

The follow-up post responds to comments and takes up the issue of "company towns" more specifically.