2006-2007
Co-sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago, Roosevelt University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University's School of Communications
Seminars are held on Fridays from 3:30-5:00 PM
at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL.
Papers are pre-circulated as email attachments. For a copy e-mail scholl@newberry.org.
October 20, 2006—Daniel Raff
November 10, 2006—Kathy M'Closkey
January 26, 2007—Phylis Johnson & Josh Gumiela
February 16, 2007—Jason Gallo
March 16, 2007—John Jenks
April 20, 2007—Sarah Rose
May 18, 2007—Christopher Loss
June 8, 2007—Richard R. John
October 20, 2006— The Book-of-the-Month Club: A Reconsideration
The Book-of-the-Month Club, which was founded in 1926, was once among the most prominent of American corporations, a powerful force in its own line of business and conspicuous enough to the general public to have been a subject for cartoons in the New Yorker. It also represented an innovative business model of considerable Coasean interest. Most of the academic literature about it, however, is written by Cultural Studies academics and concerns the development of twentieth-century American middle-class culture. In this paper, I attempt to bring the company's strategic and business history into better focus, reconstructing the economic logic and evolving results. I do this mobilizing the approach to studying business history and strategy experience more generally sketched in the papers by Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin in the American Historical Review 2003 and Enterprise and Society 2004. The issues that arise in the course of this have striking contemporary resonance.
November 10, 2006— New Insights from the Archives: How U.S. Tariffs and Global Wool Markets Affected Navajo HouseholdsFor decades anthropologists have investigated the impact of market economies on Indigenous Peoples, and its effects on their lifeways and natural resources. My second book Double Jeopardy: Navajo Weavers, Reservation Traders and the Specter of Free Trade utilizes a broad array of archival sources including government documents, and traders’ and regional wholesalers’ business records and correspondence, to reposition Navajo weavers and woolgrowers within the context of the following post-Civil War developments: 1) the increasing competitiveness of wool markets internationally and congressional tariffs legislated to ameliorate the effects on domestic woolgrowers; 2) the extraordinary changes in manufacturing and advertising that promoted the sales of standardized consumer goods at the expense of their handmade one-of-a-kind counterparts (i.e. Navajo rugs); 3) the images of “domesticity” prevalent at the time masked the significance of Navajo women's weaving to the reservation and regional economies. Today, historic Navajo textiles are valuable investments sought by wealthy collectors–over $80 million have sold through international auctions or private transactions since 1970. Such demand has decreased the market for contemporary textiles woven by 25,000 Navajo weavers. Thus my paper and slides highlight evidence that demonstrate how the inimical effects of free trade over a century ago triggered Diné impoverishment in a manner not revealed in other analyses.
January 26, 2007— Tesla and Russolo: Examining “Future” Sound Culture and Transmission at the Turn of the 20th Century
Phylis Johnson and Josh Gumiela, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
The late nineteenth century was an age of remarkable innovations in literature, science, music, and the arts. Among the most astounding of these innovations were new communications media, including what we today call radio. Contemporary debates about radio were filled with wild speculation about its consequences for politics, society, and culture. Dystopian and utopian fantasies flourished. Over time, however, these possibilities were overshadowed by political fiat and corporate prerogatives. In the process, radio became less of an agent of innovation than a commodity. This paper surveys this epochal transformation, with a focus on the inventor Nikola Tesla and the futurist Luigi Rossolo.
February 16, 2007— Like A Standing Army: The National Science Foundation and Its Uncertain Relationships with American National Security from the Cold War to Nanotechnology
Jason Gallo, University of Wisconsin–Madison
This paper examines the role of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) and argues that NSF involvement in the promotion of nanotechnology represents a broad and long-term federal commitment to achieving a symbolic, as well as technological, victory in the global race to develop this emerging technology. Both the genesis of the NSF in the aftermath of the Second World War and the historical shifts in NSF policy from the Foundation's inception in 1950 through the Internet boom of the 1990s are critical to understanding the shape and scope of current nanotechnology policy. The promotion of nanotechnology is a strategic endeavor to achieve the “next industrial revolution” and simultaneously address the uncertainty of economic globalization and asymmetrical threats to contemporary US interests. The NNI is a critical component of a US S&T policy designed to reify a competitive advantage in an increasingly globalized world no longer defined by the bipolarity of the Cold War. The NSF participates in this strategy by supporting basic nanotechnology research as well as through the funding of university-based research centers, therefore gestating a highly skilled S&E workforce crafted to sustain the nanotechnology “revolution.” This paper argues that information technology is the critical component of NBIC (nano-bio-info-cogno) convergence for three distinct reasons: it provides cybernetic control over the process of convergence, it builds upon the NSF's traditional support for information management and technologies, and it symbolically links NBIC convergence with the economic gains and social changes associated with the “information age.”
March 16, 2007— CIA Money and Global Journalism: Forum Features, 1957–1975
John Jenks, Dominican University
During the Cold War the CIA had some 800 news and propaganda assets. One of the biggest was Forum Service (later Forum World Service), an ostensibly independent news feature and commentary syndicate that operated from 1957 to 1975. This paper uses heretofore untapped archives to explore how the service recruited writers and found willing clients among hundreds of editors in Asia and Africa. Forum’s free service got the western point of view to publications that could have never afforded a commercial service, pre-empted Soviet propaganda, but skewed the news market and choked off opportunities for indigenous writers and commentators.
April 20, 2007— Creating the Disabled: Mechanization, Industrial Efficiency, and Ideal Workers, 1880-1930
Sarah Rose, University of Illinois at Chicago
This paper explores how, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, disabled people became defined as inefficient, undesirable employees. Historically, people with permanent injuries—what we now call “disabilities”—had remained integrated into their communities and routinely continued to work, albeit often at lower-skilled jobs and reduced wages. Influenced by the interconnected developments of scientific management, mechanization, piecework, and the efficiency movement, however, employers gradually became less welcoming towards disabled workers. Especially in mechanized workplaces, employers increasingly defined workers as interchangeable cogs who needed fully functional, “ideal” bodies. At the Ford Motor Company, however, Henry Ford and key subordinates adopted a different view of mechanization, one that relied heavily on the potential for subdividing labor. Ford argued that disabled people could be just as efficient as their able-bodied counterparts, if properly placed. Accordingly, during the 1910s and to a lesser degree in later decades, the Ford Motor Company provided well-paid jobs to hundreds, if not thousands, of people with disabilities at a time when such jobs were becoming increasingly scarce.
May 18, 2007— “A People’s University”: Higher Education in the New Deal
Christopher Loss, University of Virginia
Although scholars have “forgotten” it today, throughout the 1930s higher education helped bridge the gap between the central government and American citizens. This paper explores the ways in which higher education served the New Deal state, and how that service helped create an expansive national bureaucratic regime in a political culture hostile to “big government.” The existing scholarship has highlighted the academy’s role in crafting New Deal social and economic policy. Yet no study has adequately investigated the role that higher education played in delivering services and programs to citizens, in implementing many of the social and economic policies developed by its own faculty—the coterie of executive-level policymakers known as Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust.” Higher education was more than simply the intellectual engine that drove New Deal policymaking; it was a vital piece of the New Deal state itself. I argue that higher education was crucial to the New Deal’s achievement of national administrative capacity and to the preparation of citizens for life in a bureaucratic state.
June 8, 2007— Professor Morse’s Lightning: The Political Origins of the Telegraph Industry in the United States
Richard R. John, University of Illinois at Chicago
Commentator: James Schwoch, Northwestern University
Social commentators from Henry Adams to Anthony Giddens have hailed the completion by the United States government in 1844 of a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore as a landmark in the making of the modern world. Even so, the actual history of this project--as well as its broader significance for American public life--remains shrouded in mystery. This paper reconsiders this project, and, more broadly, the beginnings of the electric telegraph industry in the United States. In particular, it shows how governmental institutions and civic ideals shaped the initial, failed, commercialization of the electric telegraph as a government agency. In addition, it explains why so many contemporaries regarded government control of the new medium as a political imperative and describes how its highly selective memorialization in the post-Civil War era shaped public conceptions of telecommunications, government-business relations, and the nature of innovation.
The seminar will meet on scheduled Fridays from 3:30 to 5:00 pm, to be followed by dinner in a local restaurant. Sessions will feature either an original paper or a particularly suggestive text. If you plan to attend, please email scholl@newberry.org, or call 312.255.3524 to request a copy of the paper as an e-mail attachment. The seminar format assumes that all participants have read the essay, and that everyone who requests a paper will attend the seminar. Seminars are held at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois.
Please do not request the paper unless you plan to attend.
Individuals interested in giving papers in the future should contact Richard R. John, History Department M/C 198, University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7109; phone: (312) 996-8569; e-mail: rjohn@uic.edu.