Research Seminars

2019 - 2020 Series -- View Series PDF

• April 23, 2020: Karen Mahar, "The Right Kind of Man”: Masculinity, Identity, and the American Business Executive in the Early Twentieth Century

  In the decades after 1890, as large corporations run by salaried managers became a distinguishing feature of economic life, the term “business executive” joined the American lexicon. But even inside business circles it was unclear how to define “business executive” as an occupational category or what traits predicted an executive’s success. This paper examines efforts to define the new American business executive within business literature and popular discourse between 1890 and 1920. It argues that the slipperiness of the term reflected the weight it carried both as a real job and as a symbol of the new corporate order. It identifies multiple strands of masculinized identity associated with the idealized executive (engineering expertise, elite power, and shop floor fluency), and suggests that the emergence of this category during the height of the eugenics movement encouraged linking business leadership with white hypermasculinity.

• May 21, 2020: Danya Pilgrim, Modest Dreams & Grand Ambitions: African American Caterers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

  Location: Copeland Room, Hagley Library.

  Time: 6:30pm.