The panel aims to present and discuss papers related to digital business history. This includes the use of digitized archives, born-digital sources, relational databases, and programming in business history research, as well as new AI tools for research.
“To get there, you only need to hop on the highway, drive for some amount of time, and take the exit. It’ll be on your right.”
For those dependent upon rural America’s highway economies, these instructions suffice most of the time. Economic life is centered around highway exits, a motley collection of gas chains, bank branches, churches, and national fast-food chains with a few local options.
This panels considers financial institutions that provided credit or savings accounts to foster a broader public ‘good’, and well as individual benefit. We examine three cases from the fifteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chronological scope of the panel provides an opportunity to analyse a range of social, political, religious and economic contexts surrounding the provision of financial services promoting a broad public interest. And how these contexts shape the provisions of financial services that aim to benefit both individuals and society.
In recent years, historians have been reconsidering the significance of natural resources, and there has been a growing interest in examining the historical role of natural resource management and policy in shaping some of the key challenges and trends in the modern world. The history of natural resources lies at critical intersections of business, environmental, and political history. Developing historical research on natural resources also provides key opportunities to critically examine histories of race, gender, labor, geopolitics, and imperialism.
Corruption defined political and economic life in nineteenth century America. The rise and fall of industries, the instability of banking, and the duplicity of politicians shaped the ways in which the public understood the high moral cost of doing business. Each paper in this panel will delve into a unique aspect of nineteenth-century corruption and fraud, and their relationship to the vagaries of capitalism. David K.
Business interacts with the public interest in multiple ways, not least in the context of insurances that have a direct effect on people’s lives. In this panel, we compare and contrast different types of insurances that are rooted in various interpretations of “public interest”. The papers study burial insurance in twentieth century Germany, social security via provident funds for workers in colonial and post-colonial India, slavery insurance in the United States, and industrial life insurance agents in early twentieth-century Britain.
In recent years, scholars have recast the Cold War from a U.S.-Soviet rivalry centered on Europe to a multi-polar contest waged across the world. This new perspective has enlarged the geographical scope of inquiry and considered a wider cast of actors especially from the Global South. Yet much of this research remains focused on high-level politics or even the personalities of key leaders. This panel proposes to expand the methodological scope on research in the Cold War by connecting the field of business history with a field still dominated by diplomatic history.
The 1960s was a key decade in the evolution of the American advertising industry. Each of these papers addresses a specific element of change during this period, illuminating shifting strategies and practices, and bringing out questions of how to serve the public interest.
Despite years of being largely distinct fields, the recent trend in twentieth-century U.S. history of labor historians doing business history (Nelson Lichtenstein, Matthew Garcia)—and vice versa (Jessica Levy)—invites the question of what role organized labor has in business history. This panel approaches this question from two main angles.
Researchers in business history often discover financial and accounting archives during their research experience, and may wish to add financial or accounting information to enrich their papers. How can a business historian use this data to add a different angle or perspective to their research? The purpose of our roundtable panel is to provide opportunities for business historians to consider adding or merging accounting history into their research, as well as accounting historians to enhance their depth of business history.