Hagley History Hangout
History
About
Podcast by Hagley Museum and Library
Episodes
- Postindustrial Heritagization: Serra do Navio, Brazil and Bethlehem, PA with Julia Silva de Medeiros
What happens when industrial towns lose their defining industries? How do the remaining communities and infrastructures find meaning and a future among the postindustrial remains. The key often lies in heritagization, the process by which…
- Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman with Simon Cordery
Iowa State University historian Simon Cordery talks about his recently published biography of Albert Pullman with Hagley’s Ben Spohn. From the publisher: “Simon Cordery's Gilded Age Entrepreneur illuminates the fascinating and chaotic busi…
- IBM and Third World Modernities with André Dao
The overtly intimate relationship between tech industry leaders and politicians is on frequent display in newspapers and on screens today. In an international context, this builds on a long history of corporate involvement in shaping favor…
- Black Women’s Health and Diet Culture in America, 1965-1990 with Melina Haberl
The mid-twentieth century emergence of the black middle class in the United States reshaped American society, consumer markets, and even the bodies of African Americans. In her dissertation project, Melina Haberl, PhD candidate at Florida…
- Black Power Inc.: Corporate America and Multinational Empowerment Politics with Jessica Ann Levy
In her new book, Black Power Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics Jessica Ann Levy traces Black empowerment’s rise in 20th century American politics and its contradictions as a form of African American…
- Americans Under the Chinese Communist Triumph: DuPont China, 1947-1950 with Sanjiao Tang
Americans had established schools, hospitals, and businesses in China prior to the 1949 triumph of the Communists under Mao. What would be the fate of these institutions and their staff under the new dispensation? In his latest research, D…
- TV Town II: New York City and Television Industries with Richard Popp
New York City was the focus of the early American television industry. In TV’s early years NYC had the highest concentration of television sets, viewers, broadcasters, and infrastructure. In NYC many Americans had their first encounter wit…
- Film and American World's Fairs 1893-1964 with Dominique Bregent-Heald
Film has played a role in America’s world’s fairs since the 1893 Chicago exhibition where a horse galloping was the big cinematic draw. In her latest book project, Dr. Dominique Bregent-Heald, professor at the Memorial University of Newfou…
- Rage! At the Train Station: Long Island Railroad Controversies with Elizabeth Moore
Infrastructure projects have frequently generated controversies in American history, and railroads in particular have been the cause of many a political fracas. In her latest project, journalist and independent scholar Elizabeth Moore is u…
- Industrious Skies: Nitrogen Capture and the Atmosphere of Italian Fascism with Rebecca Falkoff
Nitrogen feeds both war and peace, represents both fecundity and strength, and accordingly, nitrogen capture technology gained a symbolic potency in the ideologically charged atmosphere of fascist Italy. In her latest research, Dr. Rebecca…
- The Rise and Fall of King Coal: American Energy Transitions, 1800-1940 with Mark Aldrich
In this episode we interview Mark Aldrich about his new book, The Rise and Fall of King Coal: American Energy Transitions in an Age of Markets, 1800-1940. From the publisher: “A history of the dynamic role of coal in the energy landscape o…
- Pennsylvania Merchants and American Ginseng in China, 1784-1840 with Audrey Ke Zhao
Ginseng is the “emperor of plants,” celebrated in traditional Chinese medicine as a sovereign remedy for diverse ailments and promoter of longevity. The introduction of American ginseng to the Chinese market in the late-eighteenth century…
- Steel Rhythms: The Many Phases of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with Kimberly Andrews
From the eighteenth-century Moravians singing hymns on communal farms, to twentieth-century steelworkers laboring in blazing furnaces, to twenty-first century healthcare and warehouse workers cutting loose at Musikfest, Bethlehem, Pennsylv…
- Care in Question: Childcare Policy and the Limits of 20thC Liberalism with Julia Fournier
Working parents rely on childcare infrastructure, and as working parent became an ever-larger proportion of the American workforce from the 1960s onward, the lack of accessible, affordable, quality childcare became a major political and cu…
- Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents with Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl
In this episode we interview Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl about her new book Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945. From the publisher: “The first book to shed light on what caused corporate executive…
- Chemical Citizenship: A History of Drug Testing in the United States with Laura Browder
The United States drug tests its citizens more than any other country and ties the rights one enjoys, rights to keep one’s baby, to do one’s job, or to vote or move freely, to the results of a given drug test. While Americans lead the worl…
- Innovation and Markets in the Beauty and Fashion Industry with Denise Sutton
Innovation plays a role in the beauty and fashion industry as it does in any line of business. New products, new techniques, and new markets animate the industry, and punctuate its history. In her latest book project, Dr. Denise Sutton, as…
- An Official History of Official Corporate Histories with Lee McGuigan
Businesses tell stories about themselves, in their advertising, in their marketing, and in their corporate biographies. Official or authorized histories of corporations form a distinctive thread in the literature in business history. In hi…
- For an 'Orderly' Globalization: Managed Liberalization in US Labor, 1945-1990 with Melanie Sheehan
American labor unions struggled to adjust to the changing dynamics of the world economy during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Charting this complex process is Dr. Melanie Sheehan, assistant professor of history at Hartwick College and…
- The Power of Patents: Global Intellectual Property, 1880-1950 with Joël Praz
Building international cooperation is a slow, painstaking process, one made more difficult when some people don’t see the need for it. To businesses, however, international cooperation is positively necessary as a means to secure intellect…
- Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers with David Suisman
Our previously scheduled episode featuring Alessandra La Rocca Link has been postponed. In lieu of which, we present this recording made during the Hagley Author Talk featuring David Suisman hosted on February 27th, 2025 by the Hagley Muse…
- Afro-Andean Sailors and Shipbuilders in Spanish America and the Black Pacific with Leo Garofalo
While popular memory may have forgotten them, about half of the sailors, soldiers, missionaries, tradesmen, and colonists that made up the Spanish Empire were black, people who were part of the African diaspora. Studying their history allo…
- A Stretch of the Imagination: Synthetic Fabrics and the Cold War with Monica Geraffo
During the Cold War, rival superpowers the USA and the USSR vied with one another for world dominion in many arenas: military, diplomatic, and even haute coture. In the latter connection, French designers played arbiter, judging the synthe…
- Plebian Consumers: Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia with Ana Maria Otero-Cleves
In this interview with Roger Horowitz, Ana Maria Otero-Cleves discusses the place of important objects in her book Plebian Consumers, especially textiles, machetes, and patent medicine. Otero-Cleves also elaborates on the crucial importanc…
- The Toxic Ship: The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade with Simone M. Müller
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 W…
- The Long Shadow of Kodak: Markets and Science in Twentieth Century Photography with Joris Mercelis
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…
- Smoking Gun: How Consumerism & Community Made an American Gun Culture 1870-1920 with Courtney Slavin
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 be…
- The Pennsylvania Railroad: The Long Decline, 1933-1968 with Albert Churella
Hagley’s Ben Spohn interviews Albert Churella about the final volume in his landmark trilogy on the history of the Pennsylvania Railroad. From the publisher: “The final volume of Albert J. Churella's landmark series, The Pennsylvania Railr…
- Sound & Music in the du Pont Women's World in the Age of Revolution with Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden
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. In t…
- International Business Associations & Regulations on Multinational Corporations with Maia Müller
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 regulat…
- On Ice: America's Nineteenth-Century Ice Age and the Making of Modern Life with Andrew Robichaud
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. Andrew Robic…
- Analog Superpowers: Technology Theft and the National Security State with Kate Epstein
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). From the publisher: “A gripping history that s…
- The Nature of War: Environment and Industry in the U.S. During WWI with Gerard Fitzgerald
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…
- “Keep Within Compass”: Geographies of Girlhood in the American South, 1783-1865 with Emily Wells
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 t…
- Plasticizing China: A Cultural History of Everyday Things, 1960-1990 with Yaxi Liu
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 cen…
- Securing the System: Phone Phreaks, Hackers, and Political Order, 1963-2013 with Jacob Bruggeman
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 hacker…
- Racial Economies of Early Jazz with Stephanie Doktor
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 thoug…
- Management as Design: Industrial Designers and Business Culture with Penelope Dean
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, academ…
- Negating Visions: Cultural Memory and Media Negatives with Stefka Hristova
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 conserva…
- Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America with Margot Canaday
In this episode of Hagley History Hangout Roger Horowitz interviews Margot Canaday about her remarkable book Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America that received the received 2024 Hagley Prize for the best book in business hist…
- New York City’s Urban Heat Island, 1860-2020 with Kara Schlichting
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, h…
- Manufacturing Self-Determination: Industry on Native American Reservations with Sam Schirvar
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…
- Back on Track American Railroad Accidents and Safety 1965-2015 with Mark Aldrich
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 o…
- Health, Safety, & Risk Communication at DuPont in the Twentieth Century with Madison Krall
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…
- Forging the Network: International Industrial Conferences, 1957-1997 with Grigorios Antoniou
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…
- Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards & the End of Financial Control with Sean Vanatta
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, th…
- The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region with David Alff
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 a…
- Techno Redux: Technology Competition Policy Lessons from the U.S. vs IBM Trial with Andrea Matwyshyn
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…
- The Channel Islands: Borderlands Migration in the Atlantic World, 1763-1815 with Sydney Watts
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…
- Making Youth Safe for Democracy: Education & American Enterprise, 1916-1980 with Maxwell Greenberg
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 managemen…