September 30, 2019
Dear BHC Program Committee Members:
We hereby submit our panel, Strange Bedfellows: Corporations and the Company They Keep, for consideration for the upcoming Business History Conference taking place in Charlotte, North Carolina, March 12-14, 2020. The panel is comprised of three papers by Lauren Klaffke (University of Minnesota), Jessica Ann Levy (University of Virginia), and Kyle Williams (University of Virginia). Commentary will be provided by our panel chair, Professor B. Alex Beasley (The University of Texas, Austin).
In her recent book, Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism, Nan Enstad challenged historians to rethink the corporation, moving beyond managers, directors, and stockholders and expand our analysis to include the full cast of characters involved in enabling business to function. Building on and expanding on this call, the papers in this panel examine a range of strange bedfellows, from relationships forged by a pharmaceutical company and a museum in the early years of the development of the industry (Lauren Klaffke); to the broad cast of characters, including conservative, environmental, and black power activists, who supported the corporate accountability movement in the 1970s and 1980s (Kyle Williams); and finally the unlikely partnership forged by one of the world’s most recognizable corporations, Coca-Cola, and black freedom fighter and first president of a democratic South Africa Nelson Mandela (Jessica Ann Levy). More than mere observations of spectacle, these papers demonstrate how people and organizations acting outside, and sometimes in opposition to, the corporation played a central role in shaping the of American business in the late twentieth-century.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Jessica Ann Levy, Kyle Williams, Lauren Klaffke, and B. Alex Beasley