Hagley History Hangout

IN DEBT TO GROWTH: REAL ESTATE & THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PUBLIC FINANCE IN NEW YORK CITY, 1880-1943 Daniel Wortel-London is a recent PhD in American History from New York University, with a research focus on political, urban, and fiscal history. Dr. Wortel-London was the 2019-2020 Louis Galambos National Fellow in Business & Politics at the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology, &...

Designing the Bombshell: Military-Industrial Materials & the Shaping of Women's Bodies in the United States Gregory Hargreaves interviews Dr. Isabelle Marina Held about her recent research at Hagley, funded by one of our grants. Dr. Held, a recent PhD in the History of Design, used Hagley materials in her research on the “bombshell assembly line,” the adoption of synthetic war-time materials, such...

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Bernardo Batiz-Lazo about his book, Cash & Dash: How ATMs & Computers Changed Banking (Oxford, 2018). Batiz-Lazo, professor of FinTech History & Global Trade at Northumbria University, used Hagley collections related to the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society. In Cash & Dash, Batiz-Lazo discusses his research on the history of financial technology, including the develop...

American educators in 1940s classrooms eagerly played corporate propaganda for their students. The source, Dupont’s Cavalcade of America, was a mid-twentieth century radio program designed to promote the values of free enterprise, productivity, & consumerism to the public through the medium of historical drama. Teachers introduced the program to classrooms to supplement lessons in the American pas...

Attitudes toward intoxication can be unstable. The government of Turkey, for example, within a single generation went from producing alcohol and promoting its consumption as civil and modern, to restricting the consumption of alcohol and prohibiting its advertisement, right down to cellphone ringtones that sound like beer bottles opening. A culture once known for its Bektashi Sufis and Janissary s...

Leprechauns have hocked Irish goods to American consumers for generations. When one of the wee folk appeared on a bottle of Irish whisky, its familiar associations marked the drink as an authentic product of an antique culture for the American consumer. From the Blarney Stone to the shamrock, symbols laden with Irish associations in the American mind have proved useful marketing tools for business...

In the 1950s, Vladimir K. Zworykin, an engineer recently retired from research at RCA, looked at the rising cost of health care and the shortage of medical personnel in America, and decided to do something about it. His solution was to apply computer engineering techniques to the problems of health care and medical diagnosis. To do so, Zworykin established an interdisciplinary research group of en...

Coming to America to start a new life is filled with challenges, even for the wealthy and well-connected. When the du Pont family crossed the Atlantic, they sought a new beginning in a land of opportunity. Burdened by sibling rivalries and divergent ideas about how best to make their fortune, the family compensated with dedication to one another and a boatload of capital invested by social and eco...

There are many reasons to give to charity: convictions of religious faith, values of service to others, and plain old greed. Charities can serve the public good, but they can also serve personal interests at the same time. In the twentieth century, some affluent Americans turned to philanthropy with mixed motivations. Faith and values mattered to them, but so too did maintaining control over their...

How much is a dollar worth? It depends who you ask, when, and where. Economic psychologists have a concept called ‘money illusion,’ which suggests that people are not actually very good at judging the value of money in the context of changing monetary conditions. Distinguishing between the perceived value of money and its “objective” market value introduces a new variable to analyses of debates ov...

Americans value equality, but have competing visions of what it should look like. The twentieth-century women’s movement was riven by class divisions. Elite women within the movement favored the uncompromising Equal Rights Amendment; while working women feared that it would undermine gains they had made in gendered workplace protections, and so favored the Women’s Status Bill, which would preserve...

The Athabasca country of Alberta once boasted the world’s premier fur hunting grounds. When the energy crises of the late twentieth century put a premium on the region’s tar sand deposits, rich in hydrocarbons useful for synthesizing oil, corporations built an industrial landscape of extraction and processing infrastructure that displaced former occupation and use of the land. The local environmen...

Forget Hollywood superstars. In the 1960s, women around the world wanted a sense of normality when they consumed cosmetics. As the Avon company attempted to win consumers for its mass-produced goods in Latin America and Europe, it adapted its marketing materials to reflect the segmentation of local and changing global ideals of beauty. In this episode of Stories from the Stacks, historian Emanuela...

In the wide-open American economy, some people fake it ‘til they make it. Historically, American impostors realized the promise of social mobility. Identifying freely with different ethnic, racial, class, gender, or professional groups allowed some Americans to challenge social norms, and to reinvent themselves in an environment of rapid and disorienting change. In this episode of Stories from the...

Trade wars are nothing new, and the weapons used to fight them sometimes backfire. During the Cold War, the United States took a carrot-and-stick approach to managing foreign relations through trade. The results were decidedly mixed. In this episode of Stories from the Stacks, Ryan Haddad, PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, discusses the use of trade controls by the United States governm...

Is it okay to have fun with computers? Joseph Weisbecker, an electrical engineer from the twentieth century, gives an unequivocal yes! During his long career, Weisbecker made it his mission to promote the use of computers for human purposes beyond business and military applications. For him, there was no shame in video games, and he wanted the world to agree. On this episode of Stories from the St...

In 1968, the New York Stock Exchange drowned in a sea of paperwork, which forced it to close to trading for one day every week. Something had to be done to allow the finite space of the trading floor to serve the potentially infinite growth in trade volume. The automation of securities trading, the replacement of open outcry pits and paperwork with electronic infrastructure, gained momentum as exc...

Print and sell posters with the Coke-a-Cola logo on them and prepare to get sued. For corporations today, brands are valued property to be aggressively defended from unauthorized use. This was not always the case. The proprietary attitude taken by companies toward their brands developed in the context of a growing consumer economy, and under the tutelage of lawyers. In this episode of Stories from...

Everybody knows Henry Ford, then there’s the tycoon you’ve never heard of, Billy Durant. The motive force behind the early success of Buick and the founding of Chevrolet and General Motors, William C. Durant developed business practices that transformed the automobile industry. Durant was a businessman of marked tenacity and impatient of restraint, and he used these qualities to amass a fortune an...

THE TVS OF TOMORROW: RCA AND THE INVENTION OF THE FLAT SCREEN TELEVISION with Benjamin Gross by Hagley Museum and Library

1918—it was an explosive time. The nation was at war. Political movements for workers and women's suffrage were gathering steam. The world was on the brink of change. What better place to explore an explosive moment in time than at an explosives factory? In our first episode of this four-part series, we dive into the conflicts and disruptions of the year 1918—from U.S. entry into World War I to th...

At the turn of the 20th century, the modern magazine was taking shape, and printers, publishers, illustrators, and advertisers were playing around with new styles and techniques for capturing their readers’ attention. In this episode, Jennifer Greenhill (associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California and author of "Playing it Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age")...

In the late 1960s, the civil rights struggle had given way to a more militant black power movement. The Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC) offered a business-friendly alternative: black empowerment through job training and economic advancement. In this episode, Jessica Levy (postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University's Department of African American Studies) talks with us ab...

Seth Lunine (lecturer in the Geography Department at University of California, Berkeley) explores the history of the high explosives industry in California and DuPont's eventual acquisition of many of these West Coast Companies. Lunine explains that he saw a hole in the historical research and discovered that the high explosives industry began in the west and came east.

In this episode, Mallory Huard (Ph. D. candidate in history and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University) introduces us to the women who picked up rod and gun as part of the Progressive Conservation movement, and how they were depicted in images, advertisements, magazines, and newspapers. More info: www.hagley.org/stories