Benjamin Schwantes

Benjamin Schwantes earned a Bachelor of Philosophy University Honors Degree in history from the University of Pittsburgh in 2001 and an M.A. in history from the University of Delaware in 2004. He received his Ph.D. from the Hagley History of Industrialization Program at Delaware in 2009. His doctoral research focused on American business management and telecommunications in the 19th century. More recently, he has conducted research on immigrant entrepreneurship in the Mid-Atlantic states during the antebellum period. He joined the German Historical Institute in 2011 and served as coordinator for Volumes 1 and 2 of the Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project (www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org). In 2016, he became a academic journal managing editor at the Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering. His first book, The Train and the Telegraph. A Revisionist History, deals with the financial and managerial relationship between the American railroad and telegraph industries in the nineteenth century. It will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in August 2019. Presently, he is researching the development of commercial email software in the 1970s and 1980s.