Patents and patent models represent one person's unique solution to an everyday problem. When we think of nineteenth-century inventions, we tend to picture things like the locomotive, the steam engine, or the telephone. But these represent only a tiny fraction of the innovations that emerged during the Golden Age of Inventing. Nineteenth-century Americans used inventing to improve every aspect of their lives, turning to machines and industrial processes the way modern Americans turn to the internet, apps, or AI to make life easier, cheaper, or safer.

Last year I processed a fascinating new addition to Hagley’s extensive collections related to color studies—the Color Marketing Group (CMG) records. CMG is an international professional association founded in 1962 that focuses on color marketing and forecasting, color trends, and design. (Read a related article I wrote here.)

As we head into October and the year's "spooky season," many of us will begin to contemplate our Halloween costumes. No doubt a popular choice will be the timeless classic: witch. Unfortunately, witches, and the women who have been accused of being them, have a fraught history in the United States, as well as around the globe. Let's take a look at one such case highlighted by a film in Hagley's Cinecraft collection:

October is nearly here, and lurking about all the ghosts, ghouls, and jack-o-lanterns is another perennial holiday season favorite: Philly Archives Film Fest!

The 2026 winners of the Hagley Prize in Business History are Ana María Otero-Cleves’ Plebian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade, and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Twentieth-century history has taught us to imagine that competitive markets compliment democracies while closed markets serve authoritarian states. However, a glance at the global scene in the first quarter of the twenty-first century turns that assumption on its head, especially with regard to emerging high-tech industries. 

Historians of interior design are only just beginning to study the design of rooms that are not in buildings, but rather in machines: trains cars, elevators, jet planes, and many others. 

This conference will explore the networks of creative and intellectual labor in American advertising and marketing, broadly defined, from the colonial period through the twentieth century.