Hagley History Hangout

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 dense urban forest connecting Boston with Washing...

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 makes anti-trust action both essential and difficu...

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. In her latest book project, Dr. Sydney Watts, ass...

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 enterprise and eventually entrepreneurialism to the yo...

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 technologies at least to the early years of mass m...

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 significant roles in the global textile industry, they...

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 suspected members of the Molly Maguires executed for the...

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 century. Inventing the term closed shop, employers...

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 became enablers, advocates, and beneficiaries of sel...

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 cyanobacteria, that can fix nitrogen and make it availabl...

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 research of Rebecca Janzen, professor of Spanish a...

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 trilogy on the history of the Pennsylvania Railroad. I...

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 University, demonstrates that this matter was of...

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 violence within its territory, and the historical and...

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 research, Moeko Yamazaki, a PhD candidate at the Univers...

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 the power on have little space in the literature. I...

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 throughout the decades, however, has been the Chem...

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 conservative, made peace with and actually administered...

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 the infrastructure and market for satellite televi...

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 Pencoyd Iron Works, which operated in the Manayunk se...

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 marketplace, and forgers to cash in on the value of...

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 uncovering the inside baseball story of the mid-tw...

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 ascent of the Chinese Communist Party, what would DuPon...

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 never defined what the “New Deal” meant and let the...

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-like streets and towering steel and concrete edifi...