Excessive heat has presented a problem for public health officials in New York City since the mid-nineteenth century building boom that covered the island of Manhattan in bricks, concrete, and other heat-storing materials. Prior to that, however, Americans had noticed that cities were warmer than their surrounding countryside as early as the 1790s.…

The political meaning of industry depends upon its context. Following the Second World War, Native American tribal governments engaged in a program of industrial development meant to secure the political self-determination of their nations. Initially concerned with attracting capital investment to reservation communities, by the 1970s native govern…

Ben Spohn interviews Mark Aldrich about his 2018 book, Back on Track American Railroad Accidents and Safety 1965-2015. This period marked a decline in safe operating on American railroads through the 1970s which were followed by a period of increased safety and profitability for American railroads. Aldrich makes the case that the joint factors of e…

The DuPont firm was a leader in workplace and community safety communications during the twentieth century. This had been baked into the company culture from the first, as gunpowder manufacturing made essential. What changed over time were the techniques and media of communication, and the intended audience targeted by the company’s messaging.In he…

Scholars often think and write about business diplomacy as something that happens between firms and national governments. But the historical pattern is more complex than that, with contacts between businesses forming a significant portion of the international circuit of communication about business and economic matters.As part of his doctoral resea…

American households are awash in expensive credit card debt. But where did all this debt come from? In this history of the rise of postwar American finance, Sean H. Vanatta shows how bankers created our credit card economy and, with it, the indebted nation we know today. America’s consumer debt machine was not inevitable. In the years after World W…

Hagley’s Ben Spohn interviews David Alff about his recent book: The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region. In this comprehensive history of America’s most heavily-traveled rail line, Alff shows ow what began as a series of disconnected nineteenth century rail lines became the spine connecting America’s Megalopolis, the…

In the United States, courts make policy through their interpretation of law and regulations. Through litigation, policy decisions are given the force of law. When litigation fails, then the object of regulation is often lost. This applies to the world of digital technologies, where corporate consolidation and the churn of ever-evolving technology …

The Channel Islands lie between Britain and France, and historically occupied a space between Europe and the Americas within circuits of movement around the Atlantic world of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This position as a place in-between gave the Channel Islands special significance to migrants, refugees, smugglers, and pirates.…

The organization “Junior Achievement” was first conceived in 1916 when three wealthy, influential men decided that American youth needed to be educated on the values of hard work, thrift, and the developing hierarchy of corporate management. From that beginning, however, the organization’s purpose evolved to promote the American system of free ente…

The “attention economy” has gotten lots of press in recent years as tech companies and advertising firms have begun to perceive human attention as a limited resource and to fight for their share of the potential revenue to be generated by it. However, the concept of human attention as an economically valuable resource goes back well beyond digital …

While it is often assumed that early industrialization was a spatially and socially concentrated phenomenon, associated primarily with white capitalists in the northwestern and northeastern corners of Europe and North America respectively, the historical reality was much more complex, and more interesting. While Britain and New England played signi…

In this episode, Ben Spohn Interviews Kevin Kenny on his book Making Sense of the Molly Maguires which recently had a special 25th anniversary release. The Molly Maguires were a secret organization operating in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region during a period of labor unrest in the 1860s and 1870s. This period culminated in the execution of twenty suspec…

In this episode Roger Horowitz interviews Vilja Hulden (University of Colorado-Boulder) about her new book, The Bosses' Union: How Employers Organized to Fight Labor before the New Deal. Her book explores how business organizations, especially the National Association of Manufacturers, sought to weaken labor unions in the first quarter of the 20th …

The self-employed have many motivations for choosing or accepting their working arrangements. A business model that taps into the desire for people to “work for themselves” can mobilize the capital, networks, and labor of large numbers of people at comparatively low cost. Whether through franchising, direct-selling, or other methods, major firms be…

Nitrogen is the most abundant element in the Earth’s atmosphere, it is essential to life and biological processes, and yet it is virtually impossible to access nitrogen absent the mediation of something or someone that can “fix” gaseous atmospheric nitrogen into a stable form. Historically, these mediators were biological organisms, such as cyanoba…

When miners go underground, they enter a spiritual realm distinct from that aboveground. Across time, places, and cultures, miners have made religious observance part of their work, building shrines, making offerings, and naming places after sacred personages. What connects these practices, and how can we access the meaning behind them?The latest r…

Even the standard railroad of the world had limits. At the dawn of the twentieth century the Pennsylvania Railroad was at the most powerful it had been. As they began to learn, even that power could only reach so far. Albert Churella’s The Pennsylvania Railroad Volume 2: The Age of Limits 1917-1933 is the recently released middle volume in his tril…

Work tires folks, and if fatigue is allowed to continue unabated, it can wear them right out. Studies of industrial and workplace fatigue during the first half of the twentieth century sought to address this pressing social and economic problem. But for whose benefit: labor or capital?The dissertation research of Tina Wei, PhD candidate at Harvard …

The Weberian definition of the state is an institution with a monopoly over legitimate violence within a defined territory. Eager to explain the genesis of European nation states, Weber’s model is a poor fit for the history and experience of American statehood. What might explain the marked failure of the United States government to monopolize viol…

In the 1970s, the National Association of Manufacturers organized a subsidiary, the Council for a Union-Free Environment, to provide member firms and managers with tools to prevent labor organization and union activity in their business operations. The council remained active into the 1990s, when it was dissolved.As part of her dissertation researc…

The history of American electricity is often told through the experiences of engineers and managers, but these were only a handful of the many thousands of workers who built, maintained, and ran electrical utility systems in the Unites States. The linemen, clerks, pipe fitters, marketers, secretaries, and many, many others who do the work to keep t…

Americans love coffee, but the coffee in American cups has changed a lot over the years. Three waves of coffee consumer culture washed over the twentieth-century United States: the mass commodity wave, the differentiation wave, and the aficionado’s wave. With each wave came changes to the way Americas bought, prepared, and consumed coffee. Present …

In this episode Roger Horowitz interviews University of Pennsylvania historian Brent Cebul about his new book Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century. In the interview Cebul explains his book’s core notions of “supply-side liberalism” and “business producerism” to explain how local elites, often quite conser…

The early history of satellite broadcast has a Gemini aspect: twin origins in the research and development laboratories of major American corporations, and in the homes and workshops of legions of grassroots tinkerers across North and South America, notably in the Caribbean. These two streams crossed in the 1980s. Companies like RCA tried to build …

Kevin Righter’s book, Philadelphia's Pencoyd Iron Works: Forging Along the Schuylkill River began as a family history project. Righter’s great grandfather, Walter Righter worked at Pencoyd from 1885 through 1933, retiring as superintendent of motive power. When Righter began research for this project, he realized that little had been written on Pen…

Would branded goods, by any other name, not smell as sweet? Branding is one means by which businesses try to communicate with consumers, cultivate trust, and capture market share. The practice has a long history in America and was central to the attempts of producers to differentiate their products, consumers to navigate the uncertainties of the ma…

Baseball fans often tout the “timeless” quality of the sport; and the air in baseball stadiums can be thick with tradition. However, the business of baseball, its labor and management practices, and its marketing and revenue systems have been a work-in-progress from the first. Sports historian Evan Brown, a PhD candidate at Columbia University, is …

The DuPont Company had a presence in China beginning in the 1920s. With a business selling imported dyestuffs, the company operated out of Shanghai until the Japanese takeover of the country. Following the Second World War, the company resumed operations, continuing even while the fighting continued during the Chinese Civil War. With the 1949 ascen…

What is the New Deal? During the election of 1932, Americans did not know what it was, but they knew that they wanted whatever it was. Dr. James Kimble’s research is on the history of this term from the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt first spoke it in the summer of 1932 to when he took office in March of 1933. Throughout the campaign season, FDR ne…

New York City played a starring role in the story of American broadcast media, perhaps especially when it came to television. The city was both a major market for television, a proving ground for television techniques and technologies, and an on-screen character in televised news and entertainment. The very physicality of the city, with its canyon-…

Artists bring a unique perspective to historical archives. Like any other researchers, they examine documents and collections to learn about their subject. Where their methods diverge is to use archival sources to shape the form and meaning of art created in two and three dimensions. The experiences of past people, accessed through the documents th…

The American tobacco oligopoly of five firms loomed large in the mid-twentieth century thanks to the addictive qualities of their products and the massive investment they made in broadcast marketing communications, influencing the media experience of millions of Americans and the wider landscape of American media for generations. Media historian Pe…

In this episode of Hagley History Hangout Roger Horowitz sits down with Alex Taylor to discuss his new book, Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s, the first dedicated history of corporate patronage in post-war art. Taylor’s book considers how a wide range of artists were deeply immersed in the marketing strategies of big busine…

What archive could possibly give you a total view of American business practice in the twentieth century? What industry touched and participated in nearly every other industry? What firm yields insight into a cavalcade of firms in one fell swoop? The answer to all of these questions is the BBD&O advertising agency archive held in the Hagley Museum …

Cognitive changes occur across the human lifespan, with consequences for economic conditions. How people have understood these changes, and managed their interaction with life and work has changed over time. As industrialization sped up work, and enhanced the wealth of society, social scientists and business leaders struggled to better understand t…

How does a movement unite the disparate interests of producer and consumers? By directing their shared ire against a powerful middleman. That is how opponents of the Standard Oil monopoly on kerosene refining and distribution joined forces to take on the corporate giant.In his dissertation project, Minseok Jang, PhD candidate at the University of A…

Joe Plasky talks about his efforts interviewing as many people as he can who worked for DuPont’s Textile Fibers Department between 1950 and 2000. Joe Plasky is a retired engineer from DuPont’s Textile Fibers Department and he has been collecting oral histories from former DuPont Textile Fibers employees for well over a decade. Every year, sometimes…

Even the most favored workers of the New Deal order, white male heads of households with unionized industrial jobs, faced economic uncertainty in the form of irregularity of work and earnings. These workers and their families made ends meet with a variety of “casual” work arrangements; seasonal labor, barter, family interdependence, etc. Much of th…

In this edition of Hagley History Hangout, Hannah Farber discusses her new prize-winning book, Underwriters of the United States, with Roger Horowitz. Her book traces how American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the formation of the United States. During American Revolution, they helped the U.S. negoti…

The distinctive landscape of south Florida has its roots in the attempt by mid-twentieth century developers to transform the “last frontier” in American into piles of cash. Where they succeeded there now reigns an over-developed suburban landscape of leisure dominated by residential spaces and amenities like golf courses and parks. The decades-long…

This special edition of the Hagley History Hangout features Dr. Margaret Mulrooney presenting her work on the DuPont Irish and celebrating the 20th Anniversary re-release of her book at an Author Talk event hosted by the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. Twenty years ago, Margaret Mulrooney’s …

Young urban professional (yuppies for short) emerged as an archetype close to the heart of transformations taking place in American society during the 1970s and 1980s. These highly-educated individuals were products and architects of a new American economy geared toward financial services and willing cannibalize much of the rest of the economy for …

Yugoslavian planners considered themselves to be architects of a third way “between the blocs,” aligned neither with the capitalist West nor the Communist East, but rather masters of their own socio-economic destiny. This ramified in the economy and on the streets of Yugoslav cities in the form of supermarkets and their larger kin department stores…

Since World War II the old industrial cities of the northeast and Midwest USA have repeatedly sought to end periods of decline by seeking to renew their downtowns. Convention centers, sports stadiums, hospitals, and tourist-oriented investment have all been deployed in an effort to restore a tax base and reinvigorate urban areas. Just as repeatedly…

Hilton Hotels started in Texas and swelled into a globe-straddling hospitality behemoth. Along the way company founder Conrad Hilton kept ideas about affordable luxury at the center of his business model. Among the affordable luxuries on offer in Hilton Hotels was an “eclectic modernist” design sensibility that placed the American consumer at the a…

America at the dawn of the twentieth century ran on anthracite coal. Burning the hard, lustrous fossil fuel heated millions of homes and powered locomotives, steamships, foundries, and factories. Nearly all of this coal came out of the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, mined by an army of workers who labored in the most dangerous industry in American …

Railroads unite. Across time and space the railroad has tied together diverse peoples and places with literal and figurative bonds. An outstanding example of this historical process is the transfer and elaboration of a railroad technocracy from origins in the United States to efflorescence in the People’s Republic of China. In his dissertation proj…

Sometimes, oral history makes up for a shortfall in the archival record, or adds depth and greater context to existing archival records. RCA had many short-lived projects in the 1960s and 1970s which aren’t as well documented as some of their other developments. Kevin Bunch is a writer and communications specialist for the International Joint Commi…

Historians of technology once famously asked, “does technology drive history?” Their answer was, “it depends.” The phenomena of history do not float atop of the changes within material practices and technology, but neither do they stand apart from them; the two are intimately entwined in the contingent, intermittent unfolding of history. The challe…