Research Seminars

2024 - 2025 Series -- View Series PDF

• September 11, 2024: Amanda Marie Martinez, "The Industry is Playing People Cheap": The Failure to Diversify the Country Music Audience in the 1990s

  In the mid-1990s, new evidence from Soundscan and Simmons Research revealed a surprisingly high interest in country music among Black and Latinx listeners. Anecdotal evidence had long suggested these listeners existed, but during this period new technologies and market research presented the country music industry with indisputable data for the first time. When country music was first created as a marketing category in the 1920s, it was invented as music for rural southern whites, and as the music industry evolved it continued to only view country listeners as exclusively white.

• October 9, 2024: Philip Scranton, “Spare Parts: A Global History of a Modern Problem – The American Home Front in World War II”

  This chapter will profile wartime spare parts sagas for US cars, trucks and radios, closing with a comparison between American and Soviet farm machinery, selected because the two nation’s vehicle and radio-receiver contexts were incommensurate. In the USSR private automobiles were virtually unknown. Radio broadcasts reached most Russians through loudspeakers in workplaces and public spaces, though well-placed Party members did have office or home sets. US households owned millions of each, but such iconic modern goods only began trickling into Soviet households after the 1940s.

• November 13, 2024: Evan Brown, “Keeping Score: Labor and Information on Baseball's Money Market”

  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 scouting and information used to make baseball’s messy labor pool legible and profitable.

• December 18, 2024: Richard John, “The Folklore of Thurman Arnold: Anti-Monopoly in the Shadow of War”

  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 economy—a project struck down by the U. S. Supreme Court. That is, they treat it as a chapter in domestic politics. This paper, in contrast, locates Arnold’s tenure in its international context—with a particular focus on his critique of the cartelization of German business under the Nazi regime.