Hagley History Hangout

While popular memory may have forgotten them, about half of the sailors, soldiers, missionaries, tradesmen, and colonists that made up the Spanish Empire were black, people who were part of the African diaspora. Studying their history allows scholars new ways to research and interpret Spanish colonialism, perhaps especially in the Pacific context. Dr. Leo Garofalo, Virginia Eason Weinmann 1951 Pro...

During the Cold War, rival superpowers the USA and the USSR vied with one another for world dominion in many arenas: military, diplomatic, and even haute coture. In the latter connection, French designers played arbiter, judging the synthetic textiles developed under capitalist and communist systems for their value in fashion. In her dissertation project, Monica Geraffo, PhD candidate at the Unive...

In this interview with Roger Horowitz, Ana Maria Otero-Cleves discusses the place of important objects in her book Plebian Consumers, especially textiles, machetes, and patent medicine. Otero-Cleves also elaborates on the crucial importance of Hagley’s Lanman and Kemp collection due to its extensive correspondence with Colombian merchants in the late 19th century to obtain supplies for its patent...

In this episode of the Hagley History Hangout we interview Simone M. Muller, professor of global environmental history at the University of Augsburg and author of the Hagley Award-winning book The Toxic Ship: The Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade. From the publisher: “An infamous voyage explores the hazardous waste trade and environmental justice - In 1986 the Khian Sea, carrying thousands of t...

Kodak enjoyed dominance over the international photography market for much of the twentieth century. Part and parcel of that success was dominance over the science of photography, achieved and maintained by a worldwide network of research laboratories. In his latest research Joris Mercelis, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, finds that the international network of Kodak research labo...

Americans, understandably, have an emotionally fraught relationship with firearms, and American gun culture bears the marks of this emotional complexity. When, and perhaps more important, why did the firearm, a tool for killing, come to bear this unique cultural baggage in America? Between 1870 and 1920, when firearms were no longer seen as a tool first, but a consumer good laden with symbolic mea...

Hagley’s Ben Spohn interviews Albert Churella about the final volume in his landmark trilogy on the history of the Pennsylvania Railroad. From the publisher: “The final volume of Albert J. Churella's landmark series, The Pennsylvania Railroad, concludes the story of the iconic transportation company, covering its long decline from the 1930s to its merger with the New York Central Railroad in 1968....

Where can you find music in the archive? Everywhere, if you know how to look. So argues our guest musicologist Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, associate professor at the University of North Texas and former NEH-Hagley postdoctoral fellow. In this episode, Dr. Geoffroy-Schwinden discusses her latest book project about amateur music making in the Francophone world during the Age of Revolution. Her parti...

The mid-twentieth century emergence of multinational corporations wealthier and more powerful than many nations presented a problem for organizations tasked with overseeing international cooperation and development. How to create a regulatory framework around multinationals that would protect the interests of disadvantaged peoples and regions, while not limiting the ability of multinational corpor...

Ice, ice, baby. In nineteenth-century America ice was everywhere. Extracted from northern ponds and shipped around the world, ice became a valuable commodity and a vital input in numerous industries. In his latest research Dr. Andrew Robichaud, Associate Professor of History at Boston University, explores the ice industry in nineteenth-century America and its many and complex impacts. From fruit t...

Roger Horowitz talks with Katherine Epstein about her new book Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State (University of Chicago Press, 2024). From the publisher: “A gripping history that spans law, international affairs, and top-secret technology to unmask the tension between intellectual property rights and national security.   At the beginning o...

Far from the battlefield the First World War spurred a massive increase in industrial output in the United States. Arms and armaments, ships and steel, a vast stream of materiel poured from American factories, mines, and mills to feed the insatiable maw of war. The consequent strain placed on American railroad infrastructure left it vulnerable to environmental disruption, such as that caused by th...

The experience of girlhood in early national and antebellum America was both circumscribed and liberated by geography. Spaces defined who American girls were expected to be. Spaces, too, allowed girls to redefine themselves and to defend themselves against irksome expectations. Looking backward, the geographies of girlhood can be read as evidence of lives both intimate and public. While the “South...

Chinese plastic is cheap and abundant. It wasn’t always. The ubiquity of plastic in twenty-first century consumer culture belies its past rarity and the many cultural meanings it has borne over time. How did plastic come to play such a central role in the economy of China? In her dissertation research Yaxi Liu, PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, reveals the story of plastic’s introduction...

Large technological systems can be vulnerable to manipulation, perhaps especially when they are centralized, monopolistic, and complacent. That was the situation in American telecommunications in the early 1960s when a generation of hackers developed techniques to manipulate the Bell telephone system to their advantage, a practice known as phone phreaking. In his dissertation research, Jacob Brugg...

What is jazz and when did it begin? Music scholars do not agree. Taking an archival perspective, however, clarifies the dilemma and allows us to see jazz where people at the time performed, recorded, consumed, and discussed what they thought of as jazz music. The emergence of jazz as an economic force, and a defining cultural aspect of an era, were tightly bound up in the prevailing system of raci...

Tracing the circulation of ideas can cast light on patterns of interaction between various people and institutions in the past. During the mid-late twentieth century, a circuit of ideas linked business culture, industrial designers, academia, and related professional organizations. The movement of values, techniques, and perspectives between these distinct but interpenetrative spaces illuminates h...

The positive image cannot exist without the negative, and the relationship between the two reveals the fundamental nature of the image as fungible, media as a process, and truth value as a matter of interpretation. Scholarship and conservation therefore have a profound responsibility to collect, preserve, and interpret media negatives for what they reveal about the relationship between positive im...

In this episode of Hagley History Hangout Roger Horowitz interviews Margot Canaday about her remarkable book Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America that received the received 2024 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history that year. Canaday’s Queer Career’s rincipal focus is on the private sector, business enterprises large and small, and traces the opportunities, obstacles, a...

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 phenomenon now known as the “urban heat islan...

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 governments had moved on to become investors in wholly o...

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 economic deregulation through the Staggers Act and...

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 her latest research, Madison Krall, assistant profe...

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 research, Grigorios Antoniou, PhD candidate at the Nat...

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 War II, state and federal regulations ensured that...