Hagley History Hangout

From the publisher: Plebeian Consumers is both a global and local study. It tells the story of how peasants, day workers, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in nineteenth-centur…

In this episode of the Hagley History Hangout we interview Simone M. Muller, professor of global environmental history at the University of Augsburg and author of the Hagley Award-winning book The Toxic Ship: The Khian Sea and the Global Waste Tra…

Kodak enjoyed dominance over the international photography market for much of the twentieth century. Part and parcel of that success was dominance over the science of photography, achieved and maintained by a worldwide network of research laborato…

Americans, understandably, have an emotionally fraught relationship with firearms, and American gun culture bears the marks of this emotional complexity. When, and perhaps more important, why did the firearm, a tool for killing, come to bear this…

Hagley’s Ben Spohn interviews Albert Churella about the final volume in his trilogy on the history of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Where can you find music in the archive? Everywhere, if you know how to look. So argues our guest musicologist Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, associate professor at the University of North Texas and former NEH-Hagley postdoctoral fellow. 

The mid-twentieth century emergence of multinational corporations wealthier and more powerful than many nations presented a problem for organizations tasked with overseeing international cooperation and development. How to create a regulatory fram…

Ice, ice, baby. In nineteenth-century America ice was everywhere. Extracted from northern ponds and shipped around the world, ice became a valuable commodity and a vital input in numerous industries.  

In his latest research Dr. A…

Roger Horowitz talks with Katherine Epstein about her new book Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State (University of Chicago Press, 2024). 

Far from the battlefield the First World War spurred a massive increase in industrial output in the United States. Arms and armaments, ships and steel, a vast stream of materiel poured from American factories, mines, and mills to feed the insatiab…

The experience of girlhood in early national and antebellum America was both circumscribed and liberated by geography. Spaces defined who American girls were expected to be. Spaces, too, allowed girls to redefine themselves and to defend themselve…

Chinese plastic is cheap and abundant. It wasn’t always. The ubiquity of plastic in twenty-first century consumer culture belies its past rarity and the many cultural meanings it has borne over time. How did plastic come to play such a central rol…

Large technological systems can be vulnerable to manipulation, perhaps especially when they are centralized, monopolistic, and complacent. That was the situation in American telecommunications in the early 1960s when a generation of hackers develo…

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…

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…

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 the…

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 tod…

Excessive heat has presented a problem for public health officials in New York City since the mid-nineteenth century building boom that covered the island of Manhattan in bricks, concrete, and other heat-storing materials. Prior to that, however,…

The political meaning of industry depends upon its context. Following the Second World War, Native American tribal governments engaged in a program of industrial development meant to secure the political self-determination of their nations. Initia…

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 increa…

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 tec…

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 i…

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 indebt…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. Howe…

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 his…

Kevin 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 the eighteenth and ni…

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…

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 a…

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 atmospheri…

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 sacre…

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. 

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. B…

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 Ameri…

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 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 United States…

Americans love coffee, but the coffee in American cups has changed a lot over the years. Three waves of coffee consumer culture washed over the twentieth-century United States: the mass commodity wave, the differentiation wave, and the aficionado’…

In this episode Roger Horowitz interviews University of Pennsylvania historian Brent Cebul about his new book Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century

The early history of satellite broadcast has a Gemini aspect: twin origins in the research and development laboratories of major American corporations, and in the homes and workshops of legions of grassroots tinkerers across North and South Americ…

Kevin Righter’s book, Philadelphia's Pencoyd Iron Works: Forging Along the Schuylkill River began as a family history project. Righter’s great grandfather, Walter Righter worked at Pencoyd from 1885 through 1933, retiring as superintendent of moti…

Would branded goods, by any other name, not smell as sweet? Branding is one means by which businesses try to communicate with consumers, cultivate trust, and capture market share. The practice has a long history in America and was central to the a…

Baseball fans often tout the “timeless” quality of the sport; and the air in baseball stadiums can be thick with tradition. However, the business of baseball, its labor and management practices, and its marketing and revenue systems have been a wo…

The DuPont Company had a presence in China beginning in the 1920s. With a business selling imported dyestuffs, the company operated out of Shanghai until the Japanese takeover of the country.

What is the New Deal? During the election of 1932, Americans did not know what it was, but they knew that they wanted whatever it was. Dr. James Kimble’s research is on the history of this term from the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt  first s…

New York City played a starring role in the story of American broadcast media, perhaps especially when it came to television. The city was both a major market for television, a proving ground for television techniques and technologies, and an on-s…

Artists bring a unique perspective to historical archives. Like any other researchers, they examine documents and collections to learn about their subject. Where their methods diverge is to use archival sources to shape the form and meaning of art…

The American tobacco oligopoly of five firms loomed large in the mid-twentieth century thanks to the addictive qualities of their products and the massive investment they made in broadcast marketing communications, influencing the media experience…

In this episode of Hagley History Hangout Roger Horowitz sits down with Alex Taylor to discuss his new book,  Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s, the first dedicated history of corporate patronage in post-war art.

What archive could possibly give you a total view of American business practice in the twentieth century? What industry touched and participated in nearly every other industry? What firm yields insight into a cavalcade of firms in one fell swoop?…

Cognitive changes occur across the human lifespan, with consequences for economic conditions. How people have understood these changes, and managed their interaction with life and work has changed over time. As industrialization sped up work, and…

How does a movement unite the disparate interests of producer and consumers? By directing their shared ire against a powerful middleman. That is how opponents of the Standard Oil monopoly on kerosene refining and distribution joined forces to take…

Joe Plasky talks about his efforts interviewing as many people as he can who worked for DuPont’s Textile Fibers Department between 1950 and 2000.

Even the most favored workers of the New Deal order, white male heads of households with unionized industrial jobs, faced economic uncertainty in the form of irregularity of work and earnings. These workers and their families made ends meet with a…

In this edition of Hagley History Hangout, Hannah Farber discusses her new prize-winning book, Underwriters of the United States, with Roger Horowitz. Her book traces how American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global tra…

The distinctive landscape of south Florida has its roots in the attempt by mid-twentieth century developers to transform the “last frontier” in American into piles of cash. Where they succeeded there now reigns an over-developed suburban landscape…

This special edition of the Hagley History Hangout features Dr. Margaret Mulrooney presenting her work on the DuPont Irish and celebrating the 20th Anniversary re-release of her book at an Author Talk event hosted by the Center for the History of…

Young urban professional (yuppies for short) emerged as an archetype close to the heart of transformations taking place in American society during the 1970s and 1980s. These highly-educated individuals were products and architects of a new America…

Yugoslavian planners considered themselves to be architects of a third way “between the blocs,” aligned neither with the capitalist West nor the Communist East, but rather masters of their own socio-economic destiny. This ramified in the economy a…

Since World War II the old industrial cities of the northeast and Midwest USA have repeatedly sought to end periods of decline by seeking to renew their downtowns. Convention centers, sports stadiums, hospitals, and tourist-oriented investment hav…

Hilton Hotels started in Texas and swelled into a globe-straddling hospitality behemoth. Along the way company founder Conrad Hilton kept ideas about affordable luxury at the center of his business model.

America at the dawn of the twentieth century ran on anthracite coal. Burning the hard, lustrous fossil fuel heated millions of homes and powered locomotives, steamships, foundries, and factories. Nearly all of this coal came out of the hills of ea…

Railroads unite. Across time and space the railroad has tied together diverse peoples and places with literal and figurative bonds. An outstanding example of this historical process is the transfer and elaboration of a railroad technocracy from or…

Sometimes, oral history makes up for a shortfall in the archival record, or adds depth and greater context to existing archival records. RCA had many short-lived projects in the 1960s and 1970s which aren’t as well documented as some of their othe…

Historians of technology once famously asked, “does technology drive history?” Their answer was, “it depends.” The phenomena of history do not float atop of the changes within material practices and technology, but neither do they stand apart from…

Long before automobiles roll off the assembly line, their many components are manufactured by a sprawling constellation of smaller businesses that supply the makers of finished automobiles. This automobile supply chain began in the 1920s within th…

Scholars have written histories of public relations. Scholars have written histories of labor. Scholars had yet to bring the two histories into conversation with one another, that is until Patricia Curtin, professor at the University of Oregon, st…

DuPont was in the fashion business. The industrial giant cultivated markets for its novel synthetic textiles, such as Rayon, by interfacing with the wider world of fashion. This process brought one Alexis Ureyvitch Sommaripa, later known as “The M…

Corporate futurists made a living with their imaginations. These professional prognosticators spent their time looking at the world around them, observing its apparent changes and trends, and reporting to business and political leaders proscribed…

The Empire of Bethlehem stretched from a small eastern-Pennsylvania city across the United States and down to Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, and Brazil. It encompassed dozens of plants, concerns, and subsidiary firms, and touched the lives of mil…

From humble beginnings wholesaling at a small tobacconist-hairdresser shop in 1915, the London Rubber Company rapidly became the UK's biggest postwar producer and exporter of disposable rubber condoms. A first-mover and innovator, the company's co…

During the 1920s, major American corporations established in-house labor unions to address worker agitation. Labor historian Alex John Fleet, PhD candidate at Wayne State University, explores the phenomenon in his dissertation research. Seeking to…

Which is better for business, keeping workers happy, or keeping workers in line? The movement for corporate social responsibility (CSR) argued that management and workers shared a partnership that could multiply productivity and profits if properl…

In A Medicated Empire, Dr. Timothy Yang, associate professor at the University of Georgia, explores the history of Japan's pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century through a close account of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, one of East Asia's…

What happens to jobs when technology changes? How do new technologies change the ways people experience and think about work? Economic historian Ben Schneider, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Work Research Institute at Oslo Metropolitan University,…

Hudson Maxim wanted his lake, and he didn’t mind twisting some arms to get it. The early-twentieth-century investor in Lake Hopatcong property wished to make it a destination for well-heeled travelers and pleasure seekers. Making his plans difficu…

What did the Cold War sound like? How did political ideologies shape the differing experiences of musicians and consumers in the capitalist versus the communist world? Did the Iron Curtain muffle the raucous sounds of western popular music? Or wer…

The tallest building of its day opened as the Great Depression really began to squeeze the American economy. Was the Empire State Building a gigantic folly perpetrated by men with sky-scraping egos? Folks in the 1930s thought so, calling the monum…

How many species had a hand in making that glass of beer? From the perspective of environmental history, human artefacts like beer result from more-than-human collaboration across time.

Concentrated market power and the weakened sway of corporate stakeholders over management have emerged as leading concerns of American political economy. In his book, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Power, Profits, and Productivity in Modern America, S…

 Between 1930 and 1980, teachers organized with allies to create new streams of funding to support public education, while their opponents counter-organized to reduce the ability of state governments to collect taxes and fund public services.…

 The du Pont family’s arrival in the United States is a well-worn tale of visionary men; what about the women of the family, their lives, perspectives, and contributions? 

Imagine an office without walls or hierarchies, a space that allows for the free and open exchange of ideas and a way to work… better. How would one implement this? More importantly, what happens when design ideals collide with workplace reality?…

Twenty-first-century Americans are saturated with visual imagery and punchy messages authored by large organizations. This was not always so.

How many fish can people catch before we exhaust the supply? Fisheries managers have deployed the language and techniques of science since the mid-nineteenth century in an intergenerational attempt to find out.

Oil palms are ubiquitous—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Ro…

Millions of black Americans left the Deep South fleeing violence and seeking opportunity during the Great Migration, one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in twentieth-century American history.

Paula A. de la Cruz-Fernández’s book Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850–1940 explores how the gender-specific cultures of sewing and embroidery shaped the US Singer Sewing Machine Co…

What is the purpose of an American corporation? Is it to serve as an integral organ of society, generating plural benefits for owners, workers, communities, and the general public alike? Or is it strictly to generate monetary benefit for…

Historian and anthropologist Nicole Welk-Joerger seeks answers in her research on cattle and sustainability in the United States. Key to this history is the changing ideas Americans had about their cattle, from hooved factories to sacred…

Did the American independent inventor ever go extinct? In his new book, American Independent Inventors In An Era of Corporate R&D, Eric S. Hintz argues that they persisted despite the development of corporate R&D during the twentieth…

How did citrus fruit come to carry its particular meaning in American consumer culture? Visual artist Suzy Kopf, instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, visited the Hagley Library to research citrus companies’ efforts to sel…

Program officer Gregory Hargreaves interviews Dr. Rebecca Altman about her research into the intimate history of synthetic materials, industrial chemistry, & the human body.

In her recently published book, Ding Dong! Avon Calling! The Women and Men of Avon Products Incorporated, Katina Manko traces the origins and growth of Avon from its founding as the California Perfume Company to the restructuring of the 2010s…

Program officer Gregory Hargreaves interviews Dr. Li Cornfeld about her research into the history of theatrical live performance as a means of unveiling and promoting novel technologies. 

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Lara Freidenfelds about her research into the history of marketers’ and advertisers’ intense targeting of pregnant women, and its implications for early pregnancy loss. 

In Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia Chatelain explores how fast food restaurants saturated black neighborhoods and became, as well, a focal point in the development of “black capitalism.” …

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Roger Bailey about his research into how naval officers’ regional identities and beliefs about race, slavery, & territorial expansion affected their command decisions.

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Dan Traficonte about his research into federal programs for technology development and their relationship with private industrial interests.

Ben Spohn interviews Grace Ong Yan about her recent book, Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture.

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Kevin Bunch about his research into the early history of video games, and his innovative use of Hagley materials to recreate forgotten games.

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Dr. Deirdre Evans-Pritchard about her media literacy project “Screentime: An Interactive Exhibition.”

Roger Horowitz interviews Emanuela Scarpellini on her recent book, Italian Fashion since 1945: A Cultural History. 

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Dr. Karen Mahar about her book project “Corner Office: Masculinity & the American Business Executive.” In support of her project, Mahan, an assistant professor, and co-director of American Studies at Siena College…

Gregory Hargreaves interviews James McElroy about his dissertation project “Racial Segmentation & Market Segregation: The Late-Twentieth-Century History of the American City Supermarket, 1960-1990.” 

Ben Spohn interviews Ben Schwantes on his recent book, The Train and the Telegraph: A Revisionist History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Brian Sarginger about his dissertation project “The Shareholder Movement: Shareholder Activism & Activists in the Twentieth Century.” 

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Danya Pilgrim about her book project “Gastronomic Alchemy: How Black Philadelphia Caterers Transformed Taste into Capital, 1790-1925.” 

Roger Horowitz interviews  Jennifer A. Delton about her recent book, The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Zachary Mann about his dissertation project “The Punch Card Imagination: Authorship & Early Computing History.”

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Louisa Iarocci about her research project “Bin, Bag, Box: The Architecture of Convenience.” 

Roger Horowitz interviews Wendy Woloson about her recent book Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

Sara Wermiel discusses her research project “Introduction of the Rolled I-Beam in the U.S.A. in the 1850s, Revisited."

Sunny Xiang talks about her book project, "The Transpacific Middle."

Dr. Amy C. Offner discusses here recent book, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Salem Elzway talk about his dissertation project, "Arms of the State: A History of the Industrial Robot in Postwar America."

Dr. Trish Kahle discusses her book project, The Graveyard Shift: Coal and Citizenship in the Age of Energy Crisis 

Dr. Rachel Lance discusses her recent book, In the Waves: My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine (Dutton, 2020).  

Dr. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo discusses his recent book, Cash & Dash: How ATMs & Computers Changed Banking.

Dr. Kevin Tennent discusses his recent research at Hagley related to American industrial democracy.

Roger Horowitz interviews Laura Phillips Sawyer about her recent book, American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940

Dr. Isabelle Marina Held discusses her recent research at Hagley.

Roger Horowitz interviews Ai Hisano about her recent book, Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat (Harvard University Press, 2019). Hisano, a senior lecturer at Kyoto University, used Hagley materials about DuPo…

Roger Horowitz interviews JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy about their recent book, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

Daniel Wortel-London is a recent PhD in American History from New York University, with a research focus on political, urban, and fiscal history.

Ben Spohn, Oral History Program Manager, presents Powderyards Radio: Listening to the Brandywine Oral History Collection

Max Moeller, Library Curator, presents "Bam! Pow!" Promotional Comic Books at the Hagley Library

Diane Bockrath, Processing Archivist, discusses “The World in Color: Chromolithography, Advertising Ephemera, and the Visual Landscape”

Reference Librarian Linda Gross discusses Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exhibition.

Explore the process of binding a leather book by hand with Senior Conservation Technician Sharon Fickeissen.

Digitization and Metadata Coordinator Skylar Harris​ walks visitors through the process of how underutilized and unidentified image collections at the Hagley Library are selected for digitization and examined for evidence to discover their or…

Learn about the history of the most common photographic processes and how they age, and get tips on how to house your best shots and prevent damage.

Hagley Processing Archivist Michael DiCamillo talks about a pivotal moment in labor history from the Virgil B. Day papers, a new collection at Hagley.

While CEO of the DuPont company and chair of the Business Roundtable Irving Shapiro spearheaded efforts in the mid-1970s to cripple the Arab League boycott of Israel.