Best Hagley Museum And Library Podcasts (2025)

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The Long Shadow of Kodak: Markets and Science in Twentieth Century Photography with Joris Mercelis 25:50

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10d ago25:50

25:50

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 laboratories. In his latest research Joris Mercelis, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, finds tha…

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Smoking Gun: How Consumerism & Community Made an American Gun Culture 1870-1920 with Courtney Slavin 36:17

25d ago36:17

36:17

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 bear this unique cultural baggage in America? Between 1870 and 1920, when firearms were no longer seen as a tool …

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The Pennsylvania Railroad: The Long Decline, 1933-1968 with Albert Churella 3:16:19

1M ago3:16:19

3:16:19

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 Railroad, concludes the story of the iconic transportation company, covering its long decline from the 1930s to its …

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Sound & Music in the du Pont Women's World in the Age of Revolution with Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden 22:19

2M ago22:19

22:19

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 this episode, Dr. Geoffroy-Schwinden discusses her latest book project about amateur music making in the Francoph…

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

2M 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

3M 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

3M 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

4M 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

4M 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

5M 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

5M 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

5M 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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Management as Design: Industrial Designers and Business Culture with Penelope Dean 24:39

6M ago24:39

24:39

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, academia, and related professional organizations. The movement of values, techniques, and perspectives between these …

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

6M 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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Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America with Margot Canaday 49:12

7M ago49:12

49:12

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 history that year. Canaday’s Queer Career’s rincipal focus is on the private sector, business enterprises large and…

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

7M 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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Manufacturing Self-Determination: Industry on Native American Reservations with Sam Schirvar 27:11

8M ago27:11

27:11

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. Initially concerned with attracting capital investment to reservation communities, by the 1970s native govern…

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

8M 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

9M 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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Forging the Network: International Industrial Conferences, 1957-1997 with Grigorios Antoniou 21:18

9M ago21:18

21:18

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 of the international circuit of communication about business and economic matters.As part of his doctoral resea…

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

10M 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

10M 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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Techno Redux: Technology Competition Policy Lessons from the U.S. vs IBM Trial with Andrea Matwyshyn 30:24

11M ago30:24

30:24

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 to the world of digital technologies, where corporate consolidation and the churn of ever-evolving technology …

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

11M 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

12M 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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Commercial Attention: Advertising, Space, & New Media in the U.S. with Jacob Saindon 27:19

12M ago27:19

27:19

The “attention economy” has gotten lots of press in recent years as tech companies and advertising firms have begun to perceive human attention as a limited resource and to fight for their share of the potential revenue to be generated by it. However, the concept of human attention as an economically valuable resource goes back well beyond digital …

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

1y 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

1y 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

1y 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

1y 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

1y 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

1y 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

1+ y 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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Tired!: Industrial and Workplace Fatigue, 1900-1950 with Tina Wei 27:54

1+ y ago27:54

27:54

Work tires folks, and if fatigue is allowed to continue unabated, it can wear them right out. Studies of industrial and workplace fatigue during the first half of the twentieth century sought to address this pressing social and economic problem. But for whose benefit: labor or capital?The dissertation research of Tina Wei, PhD candidate at Harvard …

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

1+ y 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

1+ y 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

1+ y 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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Tasteful Design: Peter Schlumbohm & the Chemex Coffeemaker with Clark Barwick 26:42

1+ y ago26:42

26:42

Americans love coffee, but the coffee in American cups has changed a lot over the years. Three waves of coffee consumer culture washed over the twentieth-century United States: the mass commodity wave, the differentiation wave, and the aficionado’s wave. With each wave came changes to the way Americas bought, prepared, and consumed coffee. Present …

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llusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century with Brent Cebul 47:00

1+ y ago47:00

47:00

In this episode Roger Horowitz interviews University of Pennsylvania historian Brent Cebul about his new book Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century. In the interview Cebul explains his book’s core notions of “supply-side liberalism” and “business producerism” to explain how local elites, often quite conser…

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Pirates of the Caribbean: U.S. Satellites & Media in the 1980s Americas with Fabian Prieto-Nañez 24:05

1+ y ago24:05

24:05

The early history of satellite broadcast has a Gemini aspect: twin origins in the research and development laboratories of major American corporations, and in the homes and workshops of legions of grassroots tinkerers across North and South America, notably in the Caribbean. These two streams crossed in the 1980s. Companies like RCA tried to build …

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

1+ y 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

1+ y 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

1+ y 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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Willing Communist Collaborators?: DuPont in China, 1946-1953 with Juanjuan Peng 32:25

1+ y ago32:25

32:25

The DuPont Company had a presence in China beginning in the 1920s. With a business selling imported dyestuffs, the company operated out of Shanghai until the Japanese takeover of the country. Following the Second World War, the company resumed operations, continuing even while the fighting continued during the Chinese Civil War. With the 1949 ascen…

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

1+ y 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

2y 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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An Artist in the Archive: Researching & Sculpting Nylon with Emily Baker 26:40

2y ago26:40

26:40

Artists bring a unique perspective to historical archives. Like any other researchers, they examine documents and collections to learn about their subject. Where their methods diverge is to use archival sources to shape the form and meaning of art created in two and three dimensions. The experiences of past people, accessed through the documents th…

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

2y 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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Forms of Persuasion: Art & Corporate Image in the 1960s with Alex Taylor 42:58

2y ago42:58

42:58

In this episode of Hagley History Hangout Roger Horowitz sits down with Alex Taylor to discuss his new book, Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s, the first dedicated history of corporate patronage in post-war art. Taylor’s book considers how a wide range of artists were deeply immersed in the marketing strategies of big busine…

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American Advertising: Researching Capitalism from the Inside Out with Cynthia Meyers 38:22

2y ago38:22

38:22

What archive could possibly give you a total view of American business practice in the twentieth century? What industry touched and participated in nearly every other industry? What firm yields insight into a cavalcade of firms in one fell swoop? The answer to all of these questions is the BBD&O advertising agency archive held in the Hagley Museum …