Benjamin Waterhouse
Benjamin Waterhouse is a historian of the culture and politics of business, primarily but not exclusively in the United States and mostly in the last 50 years or so. At UNC, he teaches courses on business history, financial crises, very recent U.S. history, and capitalism. His first book, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (Princeton University Press, 2014) explored how business associations and their lobbyists shaped economic policy and conservative politics between the 1960s and the 1990s. He published The Land of Enterprise: A Business History of the United States (Simon & Schuster, 2017), a synthesis aimed at students and the general public. His most recent book, One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion that Conquered America (W.W. Norton, 2024) examines the ideal of business ownership and entrepreneurship under the shadow of capitalist crisis since the 1970s.
Service to the BHC
Recent Conference Participation
| 2026 BHC Meeting:
Chair, Women’s Entrepreneurship in Global Perspective |
| 2025 BHC meeting:
Chair, Boundary Maintenance in U. S. Business, 1830-1980 Discussant, Labor Conflict, Labor Agency |
| 2024 BHC Meeting:
Discussant, Governing the World’s Largest Machine |
| 2023 BHC Meeting:
Chair, Deindustrializing History Discussant, Power Moves |
| 2022 BHC Meeting :
Presenter, "The Future Is Virtual"
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| 2021 BHC Virtual Meeting:
Chair, Enterprise, Politics, and the State |
| 2020 BHC Meeting:
Chair, Adventures in Free Trade: U.S. Business and Labor in the Cold War Era Discussant, The Trials of Small Business |
| 2020 BHC Meeting:
Chair, The Trials of Small Business Discussant, The Trials of Small Business |