al-mofhariz

Lee kicked of a lively discussion Friday as he wondered what the history of capitalism had to say to the history of technology, (medicine?), environment, and science (HoTeES, or HoTMeS?). Lee postulated that the interactions of capitalism/political economy and science might be expected within the realms of shared problems and jointly produced tools. I wrote a dissertation about "tools for discrimination" and the "science of difference," wherein life insurers are shown to be important sponsors of investigations into human difference---so I am on board. To help me judge Lee's hypothesis, I would like to offer a few posts over the next week that point to intersections between these two fields (HofCapitalism, HofScience/Tech/Med/Env). Let's get empirical, so to speak!



Evidence 1: Caitlin Rosenthal's exquisite essay in the most recent issue of Common-place, one of the hippest journals around. Rosenthal has one big argument, accented by a score of anecdotal ge…

A fascinating CFP for a conference on "Color, Commerce, and Consumption in Global Historical Perspective" went up a while back. The due date has passed, so that is old news. But I finally got around to looking over this 2007 Chemical Heritage Foundation piece by the conference's convener --- on the history of DuPont's work with car colors. I expected it to be all about chemical dye production, so I was surprised and fascinated by this:

In January 1925 two DuPont managers discussed the company’s need for practical advice on the psychology of colors as a means to anticipate major color fads. DuPont took a chromatic leap in October 1925 when it hired Towle and created the Duco Color Advisory Service to design the latest and most desirable color combinations for the auto industry. Born in Brooklyn, Towle had studied painting at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League. During World War I he put his art training to good use as a member of the U.S. Army’s celebrated …

John Steele Gordon argues---over on Bloomberg's recently revamped "echoes" blog---that historians of the US stock market in the mid-twentieth century has been misled by that market's most prominent index. The handiwork of a publisher (Dow) and a statistician (Jones), the Dow-Jones Industrials evolved from a series of focused indexes into a single number meant to represent the entire NY exchange, and by proxy the American economy.

But for all the power and influence this number has had, Gordon shows how dependent it is on basic assumptions. Swap out AT&T for IBM in the Depression years and the market recovery comes years before we have generally thought.

For our purposes, the Dow, its development, and public understandings of stock indexes strike me as topics awaiting a historian of science's analysis. I would read that book.

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If you haven't seen the new "echoes" blog---edited by Stephen Mihm, the UGA historian of capitalism in the US, it's wor…

Of course. That's my answer.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of giving a paper at the annual Business History Conference. The program is online, as are some of the papers and most of the abstracts. My abstracts are here. The conference organizers chose the theme "knowledge" and did a remarkable job of holding the papers and sessions to the theme. I don't think I've ever attended a conference of this size that remained so coherent.

As you might expect, historians of science, medicine, and technology jumped at a "knowledge"-based conference. I saw a handful of terrific papers. For instance, my co-panelist---Rutgers' Jamie Pietruska--- detailed the massive statistical appartus that supported the USDA's attempt at "objective" cotton forecasting in the late nineteenth century, but showed how competing statistical claims had the unintended consequence of producing increased price volatility. Another risk-centered paper---this one by Nate Holdr…