Best Hagley Museum And Library Podcasts (2025)

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International Business Associations & Regulations on Multinational Corporations with Maia Müller 22:50

5 days ago22:50

22:50

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 framework around multinationals that would protect the interests of disadvantaged peoples and regions, whil…

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On Ice: America's Nineteenth-Century Ice Age and the Making of Modern Life with Andrew Robichaud 32:49

19 days ago32:49

32:49

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 Robichaud, Associate Professor of History at Boston University, explores the ice industry in nineteenth-century Amer…

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Analog Superpowers: Technology Theft and the National Security State with Kate Epstein 45:20

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about a year ago45:20

45:20

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 spans law, international affairs, and top-secret technology to unmask the tension between intellectual property …

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The Nature of War: Environment and Industry in the U.S. During WWI with Gerard Fitzgerald 26:42

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about a year ago26:42

26:42

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 insatiable maw of war. The consequent strain placed on American railroad infrastructure left it vulnerable to e…

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“Keep Within Compass”: Geographies of Girlhood in the American South, 1783-1865 with Emily Wells 22:59

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about a year ago22:59

22:59

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 themselves against irksome expectations. Looking backward, the geographies of girlhood can be read as evidence o…

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Plasticizing China: A Cultural History of Everyday Things, 1960-1990 with Yaxi Liu 19:50

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about a year ago19:50

19:50

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 role in the economy of China?In her dissertation research Yaxi Liu, PhD candidate at the University of Oxf…

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Securing the System: Phone Phreaks, Hackers, and Political Order, 1963-2013 with Jacob Bruggeman 31:25

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about a year ago31:25

31:25

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 developed techniques to manipulate the Bell telephone system to their advantage, a practice known as phone ph…

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Racial Economies of Early Jazz with Stephanie Doktor 28:57

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about a year ago28:57

28:57

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 jazz music. The emergence of jazz as an economic force, and a defining cultural aspect of an era, were…

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Negating Visions: Cultural Memory and Media Negatives with Stefka Hristova 14:42

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about a year ago14:42

14:42

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 therefore have a profound responsibility to collect, preserve, and interpret media negatives for what they…

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New York City’s Urban Heat Island, 1860-2020 with Kara Schlichting 29:59

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about a year ago29:59

29:59

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, Americans had noticed that cities were warmer than their surrounding countryside as early as the 1790s.…

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Back on Track American Railroad Accidents and Safety 1965-2015 with Mark Aldrich 57:05

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about a year ago57:05

57:05

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 increased safety and profitability for American railroads. Aldrich makes the case that the joint factors of e…

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Health, Safety, & Risk Communication at DuPont in the Twentieth Century with Madison Krall 22:03

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about a year ago22:03

22:03

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 techniques and media of communication, and the intended audience targeted by the company’s messaging.In he…

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Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards & the End of Financial Control with Sean Vanatta 50:07

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about a year ago50:07

50:07

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 indebted nation we know today. America’s consumer debt machine was not inevitable. In the years after World W…

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The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region with David Alff 47:04

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about a year ago47:04

47:04

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 a series of disconnected nineteenth century rail lines became the spine connecting America’s Megalopolis, the…

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The Channel Islands: Borderlands Migration in the Atlantic World, 1763-1815 with Sydney Watts 27:43

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about a year ago27:43

27:43

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 in-between gave the Channel Islands special significance to migrants, refugees, smugglers, and pirates.…

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Making Youth Safe for Democracy: Education & American Enterprise, 1916-1980 with Maxwell Greenberg 28:43

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about a year ago28:43

28:43

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 that beginning, however, the organization’s purpose evolved to promote the American system of free ente…

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Labor, Technology, & Race in the Early 19th Century Global Textile Industry with Hunter Moskowitz 27:24

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about a year ago27:24

27:24

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 historical reality was much more complex, and more interesting. While Britain and New England played signi…

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Making Sense of the Molly Maguires with Kevin Kenny 1:07:30

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about a year ago1:07:30

1:07:30

In this episode, Ben Spohn Interviews Kevin Kenny on his book Making Sense of the Molly Maguires which recently had a special 25th anniversary release. The Molly Maguires were a secret organization operating in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region during a period of labor unrest in the 1860s and 1870s. This period culminated in the execution of twenty suspec…

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The Bosses' Union: How Employers Organized to Fight Labor before the New Deal with Vilja Hulden 34:51

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about a year ago34:51

34:51

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 National Association of Manufacturers, sought to weaken labor unions in the first quarter of the 20th …

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The Only Way Is Up: Self-Employment in Britain, 1950-2000 with Amy Edwards 21:01

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about a year ago21:01

21:01

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 at comparatively low cost. Whether through franchising, direct-selling, or other methods, major firms be…

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Chemistry, Capitalism, & the Commodification of Nitrogen with Chris Morris 28:47

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about a year ago28:47

28:47

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 atmospheric nitrogen into a stable form. Historically, these mediators were biological organisms, such as cyanoba…

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Holy Holes: Mining and Religion in the Americas with Rebecca Janzen 28:31

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about a year ago28:31

28:31

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 sacred personages. What connects these practices, and how can we access the meaning behind them?The latest r…

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The Pennsylvania Railroad: The Age of Limits, 1917-1933 with Albert Churella 1:44:45

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about a year ago1:44:45

1:44:45

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. Albert Churella’s The Pennsylvania Railroad Volume 2: The Age of Limits 1917-1933 is the recently released middle volume in his tril…

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Freedom to Harm: Private Violence and the American State, 1860-1895 with Hugh Wood 27:58

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about a year ago27:58

27:58

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 American statehood. What might explain the marked failure of the United States government to monopolize viol…

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The Council for a Union Free Environment with Moeko Yamazaki 9:45

about a year ago9:45

9:45

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 council remained active into the 1990s, when it was dissolved.As part of her dissertation researc…

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Power Up: A Social History of American Electricity with Trish Kahle 27:26

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about a year ago27:26

27:26

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 Unites States. The linemen, clerks, pipe fitters, marketers, secretaries, and many, many others who do the work to keep t…

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Philadelphia's Pencoyd Iron Works: Forging Along the Schuylkill River with Kevin Righter 1:05:58

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about a year ago1:05:58

1:05:58

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 motive power. When Righter began research for this project, he realized that little had been written on Pen…

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Who Can You Trust?: Brands, Deception, & Markets with Jennifer Black 26:19

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about a year ago26:19

26:19

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 attempts of producers to differentiate their products, consumers to navigate the uncertainties of the ma…

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Organized Baseball: Reworking the Transnational Circuit, 1946-1965 with Evan Brown 36:14

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about a year ago36:14

36:14

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 work-in-progress from the first. Sports historian Evan Brown, a PhD candidate at Columbia University, is …

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The Rhetorical Prehistory of the New Deal with James Kimble 48:10

2 years ago48:10

48:10

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 spoke it in the summer of 1932 to when he took office in March of 1933. Throughout the campaign season, FDR ne…

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TV Town: New York City & Broadcast Media with Richard Popp 29:33

2 years ago29:33

29:33

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-screen character in televised news and entertainment. The very physicality of the city, with its canyon-…

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Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em: American Tobacco & Broadcast Media with Peter Kovacs 26:39

2 years ago26:39

26:39

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 of millions of Americans and the wider landscape of American media for generations. Media historian Pe…

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Building an Oral History of DuPont’s Textile Fibers Department with Joe Plasky 45:48

2 years ago45:48

45:48

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. Joe Plasky is a retired engineer from DuPont’s Textile Fibers Department and he has been collecting oral histories from former DuPont Textile Fibers employees for well over a decade. Every year, sometimes…

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Survival is Improvisational: Casual Labor in Postwar America with Maia Silber 28:45

2 years ago28:45

28:45

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 variety of “casual” work arrangements; seasonal labor, barter, family interdependence, etc. Much of th…

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Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding with Hannah Farber 55:39

2 years ago55:39

55:39

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 trade to shape the formation of the United States. During American Revolution, they helped the U.S. negoti…

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How Florida Happened with Anna Andrzejewski 33:20

2 years ago33:20

33:20

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 of leisure dominated by residential spaces and amenities like golf courses and parks. The decades-long…

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Black Powder, White Lace: The DuPont Irish & Cultural Identity in 19thC USA with Margaret Mulrooney 1:17:45

2 years ago1:17:45

1:17:45

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 Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. Twenty years ago, Margaret Mulrooney’s …

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Yuppies: Wall Street & the Remaking of New York with Dylan Gottlieb 20:24

2 years ago20:24

20:24

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 American economy geared toward financial services and willing cannibalize much of the rest of the economy for …

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Links in the Chain: Department Stores in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1950s-1980s with Ivana Zimbrek 34:14

2 years ago34:14

34:14

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 and on the streets of Yugoslav cities in the form of supermarkets and their larger kin department stores…

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A Good Place to Do Business: The Politics of Downtown Renewal since 1945 with Mark Rose 46:43

2 years ago46:43

46:43

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 have all been deployed in an effort to restore a tax base and reinvigorate urban areas. Just as repeatedly…

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Be His Guest: How Conrad Hilton Made Hotels Better than Homes with Megan Elias 30:39

2 years ago30:39

30:39

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. Among the affordable luxuries on offer in Hilton Hotels was an “eclectic modernist” design sensibility that placed the American consumer at the a…

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Set the Earth on Fire: The 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike with David Correia 42:55

2 years ago42:55

42:55

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 eastern Pennsylvania, mined by an army of workers who labored in the most dangerous industry in American …

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China's Dream of a Red Railway: Technicians & Industrial Power, 1945-1976 with Benjamin Kletzer 45:25

2 years ago45:25

45:25

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 origins in the United States to efflorescence in the People’s Republic of China. In his dissertation proj…

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Oral History & Video Games: Preserving the Digital Past with Kevin Bunch 43:38

2 years ago43:38

43:38

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 other developments. Kevin Bunch is a writer and communications specialist for the International Joint Commi…

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Agroecological Farming: Prehistories of Agriculture’s Digital Turn with Alexander Liebman 29:34

2 years ago29:34

29:34

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 them; the two are intimately entwined in the contingent, intermittent unfolding of history. The challe…

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Working Relationships: A Labor-Centric History of U.S. Public Relations with Patricia Curtin 27:02

2 years ago27:02

27:02

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, started her latest book project. Dr. Curtin’s research illustrates the many connections between public re…

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Imagining the Future of Business, 1961-1996 with Gavin Benke 28:10

3 years ago28:10

28:10

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 methods for interpreting and preparing for the future. Dr. Gavin Benke, senior lecturer at Boston Unive…

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Company Unions & Worker Identity with Alex Fleet 29:57

3 years ago29:57

29:57

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 uncover how company unions intersected with changing labor-management relations, and broader changes i…

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Your Friend the Boss: Corporate Social Responsibility at DuPont, 1900-1940 with Jeffrey Muldoon 28:43

3 years ago28:43

28:43

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 properly nurtured. While labor unrest had roiled the business world for a generation, many leading American fi…

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A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry & Modern Japan with Timothy Yang 31:18

3 years ago31:18

31:18

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 most influential drug companies from the late 1910s through the early 1950s. Focusing on Hoshi's conn…

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