Stories From The Stacks

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 federalization of railroad safety via the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) drew attention to safety issues on the railroad like poor track condition, unsafe grade crossings, or engineer fatigue and left railroads with not only incentives to become safer, but enough money in their coffers to adequately shore up these safety concerns. Mark Aldrich is the Marilyn Carlson Nelson Professor of Economics emeritus at Smith College. Back on Track American Railroad Accidents and Safety 1965-2015 is a sequel to Aldrich’s earlier book on railroad safety, Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 18

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 professor of communication studies at Seton Hall University, explores the wealth of health and safety materials generated by the DuPont company during the twentieth century. From posters to motion pictures, the firm deployed a wide array of media to promote safety in the workplace and beyond. DuPont wished to convince the public that its products were safe, and to convince employees and community members that safety was their responsibility. In support of her work Dr. Krall received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. For more Hagley History Han

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 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, is exploring the significance of international industrial conferences to the development of a global network that linked high-level business leaders from across boundaries between industries, sectors, and countries. Using collections held in the Hagley Library, including the National Industrial Conference Board and trade catalog collections, Antoniou uncovers a milieu in which elites met to mingle, cut deals, and burnish their status. For more Hagley History Hangouts, more information on the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, and our many resear

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 many Americans enjoyed safe banks and inexpensive credit. Bankers, though, grew restless amid restrictive rules that made profits scarce. They experimented with new services and new technologies. They settled on credit cards, and in the 1960s mailed out reams of high-interest plastic to build a debt industry from scratch. In the 1960s and ’70s consumers fought back, using federal and state policy to make credit cards safer and more affordable. But bankers found ways to work around local rules. Beginning in 1980, Citibank and its peers relocated their card plans to South Dakota and Delaware, states with the weakes

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 Washington D.C., with New York,Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore in between. As Alff explains, the Northeast Corridor is always arriving as the many small railroads that provided service to the Corridor, after over a century of corporate mergers, and laying new rails and electrifying old ones, came to fall under the stewardship of one railroad, the Penn Central before it fell into bankruptcy. The U.S. government created Amtrak, partly in response to this crisis and it took on passenger service on the Northeast Corridor and nationwide. The Northeast Corridor remains a work in progress with the latest link

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 difficult. In her latest research, Dr. Andrea Matwyshyn, professor of law and innovation studies at Pennsylvania State University, delves into the U.S. vs IBM trial which pitted anti-trust regulators against the emergent champion firm of American computing. At issue in the trial were the anti-competitive actions taken by IBM, and the impacts they would have on the American economy, and more significantly, the American society more broadly. When the Reagan administration dropped the case, it cut off a possible future of increased competition. In support of her research Dr. Matwyshyn received funding from the Center for th

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, associate professor of history at the University of Richmond, uncovers the story of the Channel Islands as a locus of trade and migration. Her particular focus is on French refugees and migrants who left France during the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars for political and economic reasons. Among this group were the du Ponts, an aristocratic French family who fled an inhospitable environment in France in favor of entrepreneurial adventures in the new United States. Watts uses the du Pont family records held at the Hagley Library for her research. In support of her research, Dr. Watts received funding from the Hagley Cen

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 youth of the United States and several other countries. In his dissertation project Maxwell Greenberg, PhD student in history and educational policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, charts the history of Junior Achievement from its inception to 1998, when it had successfully exported its model and values to the former Soviet bloc. Greenberg’s work demonstrates how the history of education must look beyond the school as an institution to gain a broader understanding of the diverse locations and organizations involved in the education of every individual and every generation. In support of his work, Greenber

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 media and motivational psychology. In his dissertation project, Jacob Saindon, PhD candidate in geography at the University of Kentucky, explores the historical and spatial aspects of the American attention economy in its present digital form and its analog predecessors. Using historical collections held in the Hagley Library, including the Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBD&O) collection, Saindon illuminates the relationships between digital “spaces,” human perception, and the material world. In support of his work, Saindon received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Societ

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 did so within the context of a wider world of rapidly circulating ideas, people, and technologies. As part of his dissertation research, Hunter Moskowitz, PhD candidate at Northeastern University, adds to the richness and texture of our understanding of industrialization in general and the textile industry in particular. Moskowitz takes a comparative, transnational approach, using case studies of Lowell, Massachusetts, Concord, North Carolina, and Monterrey, Mexico to uncover the circulation and contestation of techniques, personnel, and social attitudes around the world. In support of his research, Moskowitz rece

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 murder of sixteen men during this period. Since then there has been disagreement, over who the Molly Maguire’s were, what they did, and their motivations. Kenny argues that this is an inadequate understanding of the Molly Maguires and points out that most of the histories describing the Molly Maguires in this light, as some sort of sinister, secret organization were written by their detractors. Kenny’s work offers a new explanation of the Molly Maguires drawing from American and Irish sources and traces the labor unrest in the pattern of the Molly Maguires back to similar groups in Ireland that operated during th

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 mounted what they called an open-shop campaign to undermine union demands that workers at unionized workplaces join the union and thereby depict labor as tyrannical and anti-democratic. These efforts continued through the 1910s and especially following the First World War. Over time employer organizations developed more nuanced strategies and publicity methods than in the early days of the century, but their inveterate opposition to organized labor persisted underneath. Hulden especially shows how the attacks on the closed shop formed the centerpiece of NAM’s anti-union strategy throughout. The book is available

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 self-employment. The latest research by Dr. Amy Edwards, senior lecturer at the University of Bristol, focuses on the tangle of personal and corporate interests around self-employment. While the top-down element of the franchise or direct-sales relationship is evident, the personal motives of the self-employed franchisee or direct-sales representative could make the arrangement mutually profitable. Bringing her family’s story into conversation with archival materials, including the Avon collection at the Hagley Library, Edwards explores the cultural as well as political and economic aspects of self-employment in late

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 available in the ecosystem and economy. Not until the advent of modern chemistry and chemical industries did a method for synthetically fixing nitrogen exist, but once developed, it became an essential component of the human economies of agriculture and warfare. In his latest research, Chris Morris, professor of history at the University of Texas – Arlington, explores the long history of nitrogen, from the guano islands of Peru to its modern re-creation as an industrially-produced, globally-traded commodity. Using Hagley Library collections including the DuPont Company archives, Morris reveals a hidden history that connect

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 and comparative literature at the University of South Carolina, addresses this cultural phenomenon as it has been manifested by miners in the Americas from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Studying cases in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and others, Janzen pulls together numerous kinds of sources, including church documents, public records, and corporate archives such as the Bethlehem Steel collection held at the Hagley Library. Janzen offers us a glimpse underground and into the hearts of miners and mining communities. In support of her work Dr. Janzen received funding from the Center for the History

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. In this interview Churella discusses how the railroad grew and changed in the early twentieth century as it faced increasing competition from other methods of transit, government oversight, and the realities of a world that was rapidly changing. Churella does this by interweaving corporate with personal history tracing the life and career of WW. Atterbury who began his career in the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Altoona shops and retired as president in 1935. Atterbury oversaw many projects during his time leading the railroad ranging from the development of the M1 steam locomotive to electrification between New York Cit

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 real concern to labor unions, business owners, management, and research scientists. Using multiple sources, including the records of the National Industrial Conference Board held at the Hagley Library, Wei explores how concept of industrial fatigue changed over time from a primarily physical matter to one focused on mental and emotional states. In support of her work, Wei received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. For more information on our funding opportunities, and more Hagley History Hangouts, visit us online at hagley.org.

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 contemporary prevalence of violence in American civil society? In his dissertation research, Hugh Wood, PhD candidate at Cambridge University seeks to find an answer. Using three case studies of private violence sanctioned by the state, expropriation and murder of indigenous people in the West, corporate policing and labor discipline in the industrial North, and the night riders and lynchings of the Jim Crow South, Wood explores the long history of bloodletting in American civil society. Wood’s project explores an essential element of American history with profound implications for the present. In support of his wo

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 University of Oregon, dug into the NAM collection and the CUE records in particular. Here research was supported by the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. For more Hagley History Hangouts visit us online at hagley.org/hhh.

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. In fact, we have collectively learned not to see these workers and the work that they do even when they are right in front of our eyes. That’s where the research of energy historian Trish Kahle enters the picture. Dr. Kahle, former NEH-Hagley postdoctoral fellow and current assistant professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University – Qatar, researches the social relations that develop within and around energy systems. Her current project examines the development of the American electrical grid through major episodes in its history: early forays into the construction process in th