The volumes in this series are developed in conjunction with annual conferences held at the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. The individual volumes, and the series as a whole, focus widely on the relationship between institutions and culture and, more narrowly, on the influence enterprises and technologies have on the cultural practices of American society as well as the influence culture has on technology and business.
Series Editor:
Roger Horowitz
Director, Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, Hagley Museum and Library
Staff Editorial Contact:
Robert Lockhart, Senior Editor rlockhar@upenn.edu
Edited by Richard Popp, Brenton Malin and Wendy A. Woloson
Price: $75.00
ISBN: 9781512827507
Pub Date: June 2025
Format: Hardcover
328 Pages
This volume asks how our understanding of business history changes when we take the emotional dynamics of intimacy to be foundational elements of commercial persuasion. It explores how feelings of personal familiarity, from face-to-face interactions to long-distance appeals, have been leveraged by marketers since the late nineteenth century.
Capitalism and the Senses is the first edited volume to explore how the forces of capitalism are entangled with everyday sensory experience. Contributors show not only how seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching have been commodified but also where the senses have resisted control and the logic of markets.
Surveillance Capitalism in America explores the historical development of commercial surveillance long before computers and suggests that a ubiquitous but often unseen surveillance infrastructure created by business and the state has been central to American capitalism since the nation's founding.
Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America
Edited by Richard R. John and Kim Phillips-Fein
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 9780812224481
Pub Date: March 2019
Format: Paperback
312 Pages
Appealing to historians working in the fields of business history, political history, and the history of capitalism, Capital Gains highlights the causes, character, and consequences of business activism and underscores the centrality of business to any full understanding of the politics of the twentieth century—and today.
Capitalism's Hidden Worlds examines economic activities that occur in the concealed corners of the formal economy. Challenging common conceptions of capitalism as a system of transparent, open markets, essays reveal how capitalism depends upon, adapts to, and gains legitimacy from activities that occur outside the measured and the seen.
Scholars investigate sound as part of the social construction of historical experience and as an element of the sensory relationship people have to the world, showing how hearing and listening can inform people's feelings, ideas, decisions, and actions.
Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome
Price: $74.95
ISBN: 9780812249019
Pub Date: May 2017
Format: Hardcover
312 Pages
Can capitalism ever truly be environmentally conscious? Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century provides a historical analysis of the relationship between business interests and environmental initiatives over the past century.
Producing Fashion looks to the past, revealing the rationale behind style choices, while explaining how the interplay of custom, invented traditions, and sales imperatives continue to drive innovation in the fashion industries.
This collection of fascinating historical case studies reveals the remarkable inner workings of the modern food provisioning system and the complex web of institutions that move food from the farm to the dinner table.
The Business of Tourism transports readers from the foundations of mass leisure travel in 1860s Egypt to contemporary religious sight-seeing in Branson, Missouri; from the Stalinist Soviet Union to post-Soviet Cuba. This collection of ten essays explores the enterprises, institutions, and technologies of tourist activity.
