Library Events

The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society organizes events designed to bring attention to Hagley’s research collections and the topics with which they engage. Our author talk series features recent original books that draw on Hagley materials and address topics of interest to a general audience. Research seminars invite audiences to read and offer thoughts on pre-circulated work in progress original historical essays, and intended for a cross-over audience of active scholars and the interested public. Conferences are organized in around a thematic call for papers and are comprised of academic presentations based on original research. Many conferences form the basis for edited volumes published in the University of Pennsylvania Press series, Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture.

Upcoming History Hangouts

A virtual event produced by the Center for Business History featuring in-depth talks with staff and scholars about moments in U.S. history documented by collections at the Hagley Library.

11
November 2024
Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America

Margot Canaday’s Queer Career’s principal focus is on the private sector, business enterprises large and small, and traces the opportunities, obstacles, and accomplishments of LGBT+ people as they sought to make a living from the 1950s through today. She emphasizes that as federal and many state agencies routinely refused to hire LGBT+ people, their most important sources of employment was in the private sector. Still facing pressures to keep their sexuality hidden in their jobs, their precarity lead them to accept lesser positions and pay than they might otherwise would have qualified for. Once stablished, they nonetheless made great strides in economic opportunity over these decades in white collar and blue collar jobs, and by creating their own firms.  
25
November 2024
Negating Visions: Cultural Memory and Media Negatives

The positive image cannot exist without the negative, and the relationship between the two reveals the fundamental nature of the image as fungible, media as a process, and truth value as a matter of interpretation. Scholarship and conservation therefore have a profound responsibility to collect, preserve, and interpret media negatives for what they reveal about the relationship between positive images and the truth. 
9
December 2024
Management as Design: Industrial Designers and Business Culture

Tracing the circulation of ideas can cast light on patterns of interaction between various people and institutions in the past. During the mid-late twentieth century, a circuit of ideas linked business culture, industrial designers, academia, and related professional organizations. The movement of values, techniques, and perspectives between these distinct but interpenetrative spaces illuminates how they related to one another in historical context.  
23
December 2024
Racial Economies of Early Jazz

What is jazz and when did it begin? Music scholars do not agree. Taking an archival perspective, however, clarifies the dilemma and allows us to see jazz where people at the time performed, recorded, consumed, and discussed what they thought of as jazz music. The emergence of jazz as an economic force, and a defining cultural aspect of an era, were tightly bound up in the prevailing system of racism, segregation, and inequality in the early twentieth-century United States. 

View all upcoming and past History Hangouts

Upcoming Author Talks

Author talks explore a wide range of fascinating topics related to the history of American enterprise. The talks are free -- those planning to attend should contact Carol Lockman at clockman@hagley.org or (302) 658-2400, ext. 243.

5
December 2024
Author Talk: David Alff

David Alff will speak about his book, The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region at the fall’s second author talk. It is the first comprehensive history of the most heavily-travelled train line in the United States. Alff shows how these nineteenth-century train tracks transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial...

View all upcoming and past author talks

Upcoming Research Seminars

For more than twenty years Hagley’s research seminars have brought innovative work-in-progress essays for wide-ranging discussions on Thursday evenings during the academic year. Those planning to attend are encouraged to read the paper in advance as the author does not deliver a lecture. For papers, contact Carol Lockman at clockman@hagley.org or (302) 658-2400, ext. 243.

13
November 2024
Research Seminar: Evan Brown

The paper is based on the third chapter of Brown’s Columbia University dissertation in progress. It follows management grappling with a changing baseball labor market over the 1950s. It argues that their own crackdown on labor mobility (previous chapter), in combination with labor market expansion through racial desegregation and international recruitment, heaped pressure on the systems of...
18
December 2024
Research Seminar: Richard John

Thurman Arnold’s tenure as head of the antitrust division at the U. S. Justice Department has long been regarded as a pivotal event in mid-twentieth-century U. S. government business relations. Most historical writing on this topic (eg Alan Brinkley, Ellis Hawley, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) views it in relationship to the Democratic party’s failed attempt to restructure the U. S. political...

View all upcoming and past research seminars