Hagley History Hangout

During the 1920s, major American corporations established in-house labor unions to address worker agitation. Labor historian Alex John Fleet, PhD candidate at Wayne State University, explores the phenomenon in his dissertation research. Seeking to uncover how company unions intersected with changing labor-management relations, and broader changes in the workplace social environment, Fleet explored...

Which is better for business, keeping workers happy, or keeping workers in line? The movement for corporate social responsibility (CSR) argued that management and workers shared a partnership that could multiply productivity and profits if properly nurtured. While labor unrest had roiled the business world for a generation, many leading American firms reacted by maintaining paramilitary private po...

In "A Medicated Empire," Dr. Timothy Yang, associate professor at the University of Georgia, explores the history of Japan's pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century through a close account of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, one of East Asia's most influential drug companies from the late 1910s through the early 1950s. Focusing on Hoshi's connections to Japan's emerging nation-state and empir...

What happens to jobs when technology changes? How do new technologies change the ways people experience and think about work? Economic historian Ben Schneider, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Work Research Institute at Oslo Metropolitan University, explores these questions and more in his research on technology and work. Taking textile manufacturing and transportation as his case studies, Dr. Schneider...

Hudson Maxim wanted his lake, and he didn’t mind twisting some arms to get it. The early-twentieth-century investor in Lake Hopatcong property wished to make it a destination for well-heeled travelers and pleasure seekers. Making his plans difficult were a cadre of challenges from intransigent executives, to the Morris Canal, to the hydrography of the lake itself. Environmental scholar Peter Astra...

What did the Cold War sound like? How did political ideologies shape the differing experiences of musicians and consumers in the capitalist versus the communist world? Did the Iron Curtain muffle the raucous sounds of western popular music? Or were consumers in communist countries able to access capitalist pop? All these questions and more find answers in the work of cultural historian, and 2022 H...

The tallest building of its day opened as the Great Depression really began to squeeze the American economy. Was the Empire State Building a gigantic folly perpetrated by men with sky-scraping egos? Folks in the 1930s thought so, calling the monument the “Empty State Building,” because so little of its space had been rented. Yet, when viewed from the vantage of the twenty-first century through the...

How many species had a hand in making that glass of beer? From the perspective of environmental history, human artefacts like beer result from more-than-human collaboration across time. Barley plants, hop vines, single-cell organisms, and a multiplicity of humans work together to bring beer into existence, and react to changes in the meteorological and economic climates. Taking these interactions...

Concentrated market power and the weakened sway of corporate stakeholders over management have emerged as leading concerns of American political economy. In his book, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Power, Profits, and Productivity in Modern America, Samuel Milner provides a historical context for contemporary efforts to resolve these anxieties by examining the contest to control the distribution of co...

Tax the Rich: Teachers’ Fight to Fund Public Schools with Kelly Goodman Education is among the largest public expenditures in the United States. How is school funding determined, and by whom? Between 1930 and 1980, teachers organized with allies to create new streams of funding to support public education, while their opponents counter-organized to reduce the ability of state governments to collec...

Silence speaks volumes. Especially silences in historical memory, which reflect the values of a society as it chooses what and whom to remember. The du Pont family’s arrival in the United States is a well-worn tale of visionary men; what about the women of the family, their lives, perspectives, and contributions? The low profile of du Pont women in historical memory compared to that of their male...

Imagine an office without walls or hierarchies, a space that allows for the free and open exchange of ideas and a way to work… better. How would one implement this? More importantly, what happens when design ideals collide with workplace reality? Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler’s new book, Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office answers these questions. Kauffman-Buhler traces the evolution of...

Twenty-first-century Americans are saturated with visual imagery and punchy messages authored by large organizations. This was not always so. Techniques for standardized mass communication developed in the late nineteenth century, such as photography, inexpensive printing, “magic lanterns,” and motion pictures, offered organization leaders unprecedented means to create shared understandings of fac...

How many fish can people catch before we exhaust the supply? Fisheries managers have deployed the language and techniques of science since the mid-nineteenth century in an intergenerational attempt to find out. Their efforts were part of a longer debate over whether the seas are an inexhaustible resource for human exploitation, or whether there are practical limits to the sustainability of marine...

Oil palms are ubiquitous - grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows, sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oi...

Millions of black Americans left the Deep South fleeing violence and seeking opportunity during the Great Migration, one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in twentieth-century American history. Some communities welcomed these newcomers with open arms, going so far as to actively recruit them as industrial labor, while others attempted to shut their doors, to maintain their homogeneity throug...

Paula A. de la Cruz-Fernández’s book Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850–1940 explores how the gender-specific cultures of sewing and embroidery shaped the US Singer Sewing Machine Company’s operations. Using the cases of Spain and Mexico, Fernandez details how the cultural, everyday realm of female use of sewing machines for family or business...

What is the purpose of an American corporation? Is it to serve as an integral organ of society, generating plural benefits for owners, workers, communities, and the general public alike? Or is it strictly to generate monetary benefit for its owners? During the twentieth century, the dominant model of the American corporation shifted from the former to the latter. This so-called shareholder value r...

Americans love cows. The United States possesses an entire economic sector geared for rearing, feeding, slaughtering, shipping, and eating the big-eyed ruminants. So all-encompassing is the American cattle-industrial complex that it helps determine what crops are grown on what land, what is done with the waste materials from chemical and food processing, the composition of soils, the purity of air...

Did the American independent inventor ever go extinct? In his new book, American Independent Inventors In An Era of Corporate R&D, Eric S. Hintz argues that they persisted despite the development of corporate R&D during the twentieth century. In his new book Hintz explores the relationship between independent inventors and corporate R&D departments. While corporate R&D departments did eventually s...

How did citrus fruit come to carry its particular meaning in American consumer culture? Visual artist Suzy Kopf, instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, visited the Hagley Library to research citrus companies’ efforts to sell their products to Americans. What she found was a much deeper story of how changing technologies, markets, and popular culture made citrus, and its semitropical...

Hagley Center program officer Gregory Hargreaves interviews Dr. Rebecca Altman about her research into the intimate history of synthetic materials, industrial chemistry, & the human body. Altman, an environmental sociologist, has made extensive use of the Hagley Library’s vast collection of digitized materials available worldwide at digital.hagley.org. Cattle drinking from a creek near the Ohio Ri...

The Avon lady going door to door is a part of the popular American memory. From its founding in the nineteenth century Avon recruited women to make up its direct sales force, and later its emerging middle management class, encouraging them to take ownership of their own small business and to earn an income on their own. Many women were enthusiastic to heed this call and sell beauty and household p...

Hagley Center program officer Gregory Hargreaves interviews Dr. Li Cornfeld about her research into the history of theatrical live performance as a means of unveiling and promoting novel technologies. In support of her project, Cornfeld, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Digital Studies Institute, received a NEH-Hagley postdoctoral fellowship from Center for the History of Busine...

Hagley Center program officer Gregory Hargreaves interviews Lara Freidenfelds about her research into the history of marketers’ and advertisers’ intense targeting of pregnant women, and its implications for early pregnancy loss. In support of her project, Freidenfelds, a historian of science, received a research grant from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society. Pregnant wom...