May 18, 2012
The Library of Congress Geography and Map Division and the Phillip Lee Phillips Society are hosting Visualizing the Nation’s Capital: Two Centuies of Mapping Washington D.C. The conference maps the nation’s capital, covering the period from Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan to the present day. The multi-disciplinary event includes historians, archaeologists, building and landscape architects, urban planners, cartographers, geographers, land surveyors, LOC specialists and Anthony Williams, the former mayor of Washington D.C.
The two-day event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. To RSVP, contact specialevents@loc.gov or call (202) 707-1616.
The full conference schedule is available online, including speakers, topics, and abstracts.
June 1, 2012
From the Society of Architectural Historians:
The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for papers for its 66th Annual Conference in Buffalo, NY, April 10-14, 2013. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words no later than June 1st for one of the thematic sessions listed here. There will also be open sessions for those whose research does not match any of the themed sessions. Those submitting to the open sessions will follow the same deadline and process as those submitting to a thematic session. This is a change from previous call for papers. Only one abstract per author or co-author may be submitted. SAH is using an online abstract submission process – please do not send your abstract to the session chair’s email address as this will delay the review of your abstract or possibly void your submission.
If submitting to a thematic session, send your CV to the appropriate session chair and the SAH office. If submitting to the open session, send your CV to the SAH office only.
Abstracts should define the subject and summarize the argument to be presented in the proposed paper. The content of that paper should be the product of well-documented original research that is primarily analytical and interpretative rather than descriptive in nature. Papers cannot have been previously published or presented in public except to a small, local audience. All abstracts will be held in confidence during the review and selection process and only the session chair and General Chair will have access to them.
June 7, 2012
“Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of Nineteenth-Century America,” an exhibition currently installed at the Library Company of Philadelphia, showcases the many ways in which Americans earned a living through economic transactions made beyond the spheres of “legitimate” commerce. Entrepreneurs of this sort included everyone from prostitutes and card sharps to confidence men, mock auctioneers, pickpockets, fences of stolen goods, and many others.
Although these shadow economies may have unfolded “off the books,” they were anything but marginal. Instead, they were crucially important parts of the mainstream economy, bound up in the development of commercial and industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century America. The shadow economy’s successful entrepreneurs-women, people of color, and children among them-had to be even more creative, flexible, and adaptive than “respectable” counterparts. During this critical period, the rules of “legitimate” economic engagement were still being established. What separated legal from illegal, moral from immoral, acceptable from disdained activities were far from settled issues. The practices, networks, and goods that constituted shadow economies often paralleled and in some instances overlapped with those found in wholesale and retail businesses, calling into question the morality and legitimacy of legal economic transactions.
The conference will highlight the innovative research being done by historians of capitalism and its culture as well as the rich collections of the Library Company that supports study of these topics.
(H-Material Culture)
June 10, 2012
The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries is a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, organizational, and social issues. JCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term “digital libraries”, including (but not limited to) new forms of information institutions and organizations; operational information systems with all manner of digital content; new means of selecting, collecting, organizing, distributing, and accessing digital content; theoretical models of information media, including document genres and electronic publishing; and theory and practice of use of managed content in science and education.
June 11, 2012
The American Jewish Historical Society’s 2012 conference, Beyond Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studying American Jews will be held June 11-13, 2012 at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th St., New York, NY. The conference schedule is available here (PDF) and registration information is available here.
June 14, 2012
The Conference on New York State History is an annual meeting of historians, librarians, archivists, educators, and community members who are interested in the history, people, and culture of New York State and who want to share information and ideas about historical research and programming. Each year the Conference brings together several hundred interested scholars and students at locations across the state of New York.
(From nysha.org)
Proposal deadline is December 31, 2011. Details are available on the conference website.
June 15, 2012
The 23rd Annual Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association conference will be held November 1-3, 2012 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
From mapaca.net:
Proposals are welcome on all aspects of American and popular culture. To submit a proposal, please send a 150-word abstract and a brief CV or bio to the appropriate area chair by June 15, 2012. Panels of 3 presenters, single papers, roundtables, or alternative formats are encouraged.
MAPACA’s membership is comprised of college and university faculty, independent scholars and artists, and graduate and undergraduate students. MAPACA is an inclusive professional organization dedicated to the study of popular and American culture in all their multi-disciplinary manifestations. It is a regional division of the Popular Culture and American Culture Association, which, in the words of Popular Culture Association founder Ray Browne, is a “multi-disciplinary association interested in new approaches to the expressions, mass media and all other phenomena of everyday life.”
June 21, 2012
Historians of business, technology, and industry have examined the role of the nineteenth-century German chemical industry in revolutionizing the production of dyes, paints, and pigments. We know a good deal about chemists, R&D directors, and managers in the global chemical industry, but we know less about how their color inventions and innovations had an impact on markets, product design, and consumer culture during the great industrial era that stretched from the 1850s through the 1970s.
This workshop seeks to attract scholars in various disciplines (including history, anthropology, art history, design history, sociology, and cultural studies) whose original research on broad historical topics (e.g., the history of marketing, the history of international business, the history scientific knowledge) touches on the history of color in some way. We hope to assemble a diverse group of scholars for an interdisciplinary dialogue that makes sense of the global history of color, consumption, and commerce in the 19th and 20th centuries. We welcome contributions from university scholars, museum curators, librarians and archivists, and independent researchers. We are particularly interested in papers that make innovative use of historical primary sources, such as corporate archives, trade and industry journals, import-export data, designers’ diaries, notebooks, and correspondence, and advertising and marketing ephemera.
Conference Website
July 27, 2012
The 14th Conference on Women and the Civil War will be held July 27-29, 2012 at DuQuesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The event includes offsite workshops at the Heinz Historical Center, field trips to the Alleghany Arsenal site, Alleghany Cemetery, and Fort Pitt Historic Site, and as well as traditional presentations and papers. The full schedule is available online. Registration and lodging information is available by clicking here.
August 3, 2012
The Society for Values in Higher Education has announced the dates for its summer conference. Imagination and Compassion in Higher Education will be held August 3-7, 2012 at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Registration for the conference is available here.
From the conference website:
Imagination and compassion are necessary, even obligatory, tools to prepare the next generations to survive and to thrive in a time we may not know, understand, or live to see. Yet, in education today, imagination seems to be, at best, an extracurricular concern while compassion is only the haphazard consequence of the standard curriculum. At its 2012 annual meeting, the Society for Values in Higher Education will investigate the role of imagination and compassion in the ways we understand human realities in order to revitalize their role in higher education.