This panel analyzes how visual representations helped promote and support different political economy projects and regimes in the twentieth century amidst the global diffusion of capitalism.
“Commercial Television and the Crises of the 1960s and ’70s” explores the challenges of television broadcasting in changing technological, urban, and political landscapes. In particular, we study the relationship between commercial television broadcasting and the uniquely modern problems of radioactivity, urban signal interference, and decolonization. Stamm’s paper examines American anxiety over the radioactive output of media devices during the Cold War.
The articles in this panel tell the stories of individuals with visions of the transformative power of capitalism. Each—a publisher, sociologist, and businessman—sought not only to explain and understand the nature of capitalism as it existed but also to imagine and describe a transformed society. These essays examine the work of these individuals and, more generally, the history of changing ideas about capitalism itself.
Business histories have long concerned themselves with questions of region and location. But in recent decades, a new generation of historians of capitalism have put space at the very center of their analyses. This roundtable unites some of those scholars of business, capitalism, and cities to discuss how questions of space, place, scale, and political-economic zones are informing their new scholarship. Together and individually, the panelists will discuss how uneven geographies facilitate or direct capital accumulation, investment, and extraction over time.
On June 23, 2022, the U. S. Supreme Court released one of its most controversial decisions in recent decades, New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, which established a right to carry firearms outside one’s home for self-defense. For historians of the early republic, Bruen’s appeal to “text, history, and tradition” means the work of rigorous historically grounded study of firearms in North American history has never been more important.
Too often Native nations’ economic histories and conceptions of public and national good go overlooked. This panel asserts that when we ask questions about “public interest” in the United States, our answers become more complicated when we take (Non)Indigenous publics and interests into account. The panelists and the chair, Dr.
Despite the remarkable strides in the historiographies on Africa’s economies, narratives of African economic (and business) history still tend to be dominated by discourses on the Atlantic Slave Trade and its attendant economic transformations, European businesses in the colonial period, and more recently, rural agrarian developments. In the postcolonial period, these scholarly interests have waned significantly. Thus, our panel offers a revival of new discourses on African economic histories by proposing novel ways of imagining and thinking about African
This panel will explore the relationship between enterprise management, labor, and the “public interest” in three seemingly disparate settings: industrial meat-processing in the 21st century United States, agriculture in the late 20th century United States, and chemical production in the late 20th century Soviet Union.
The American consumer nation has an environmental footprint that spans the globe.
Environmental and business historians have well documented the ecological impact of American
consumerism, often tracing the history of global commodity flows. However, the retail spaces
where consumers purchase their goods has received little attention. Retail space offers a chance
to study how consumers and corporations meet and interact with the ecologies of mass-market
consumption. Within these spaces, businesses prescribe certain ideas about resources, leisure,
With the sudden return of financial instability in the spring of 2024 (Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse, First Republic, etc.), the topic of financial oversight has returned to the headlines. What role can and should regulatory authorities play in the national and international financial system, particularly in times of crisis?