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Hagley Center Fall Conference "Seeing like a Capitalist: Historie…

The 2018 fall conference of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society will explore the history of commercial surveillance in the United States, from settlement to the present. For more information, please see the call for…

Center Fall Conference: “Commercial Pictures and the Arts and Technics…

The 2019 fall conference will convene an international group of scholars concerned with the power of pictures in the world of commerce. As pictures became a central feature of the advertising message in the second half of the nineteenth century,…

AVON: AN INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON ITS ARCHIVE

Avon Products, Inc., is one of the oldest direct selling companies in America. It traces its origins to 1886, when David H. McConnell bought the Union Publishing Company and started manufacturing perfumes to give away with his books. McConnell d…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH KEVIN BUNCH

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Kevin Bunch about his research into the early history of video games, and his innovative use of Hagley materials to recreate forgotten games. In support of his project, Bunch, a writer & communica…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH GRACE ONG YAN

Ben Spohn interviews Grace Ong Yan about her recent book, Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture. In her book, Ong Yan explores the development of corporate Modernism through architectural branding. She does this by…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH DAN TRAFICONTE

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Dan Traficonte about his research into federal programs for technology development and their relationship with private industrial interests. In support of his project, Traficonte, a PhD cand…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH ROGER BAILEY

Gregory Hargreaves interviews Roger Bailey about his research into how naval officers’ regional identities and beliefs about race, slavery, & territorial expansion affected their command decisions. In support of his proje…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH MARCIA CHATELAIN

In Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia Chatelain explores how fast food restaurants saturated black neighborhoods and became, as well, a focal point in the development of “black capitalism.” To tell thi…

Hagley Center 2021 Fall Conference

REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE: A CONFERENCE ON COMMERCIAL INTIMACY AND PERSONALIZATION A CONFERENCE AT HAGLEY LIBRARY, WILMINGTON DELAWARE CALL FOR PAPERS In today’s wired world, marketers have heralded their ability to use apps, social media, and othe…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH MEGAN ELIAS

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 Hil…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH JONATHAN ROBINS

OIL PALM: A GLOBAL HISTORY Oil palms are ubiquitous—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookie…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH AARON VAN NESTE

THE NOT SO INEXHAUSTIBLE SEA: FISHERIES SCIENCE & MANAGEMENT, 1863-PRESENT How many fish can people catch before we exhaust the supply? Fisheries managers have deployed the language and techniques of science since the mid-nineteenth century in an…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH DEREK VOURI-RICHARD

INDUSTRIAL SEMIOTIC & VISUAL COMPLEXES: A STUDY OF THE UNITED STATES VISUAL CULTURE FROM THE 1880S TO THE 1950S Twenty-first-century Americans are saturated with visual imagery and punchy messages authored by large organizations. This was not alw…

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Author Talk: Rachel Lance

Rachel Lance will speak about her successful detective work uncovering the story behind the sinking of the Confederate submarine the HL Hunley. Deployed in the 1864 battle of Charleston har…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH KELSEY MCNIFF

“PEOPLE OF SOME TALENT & SO MUCH VIRTUE”: FORGOTTEN LIVES OF DU PONT WOMEN HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH KELSEY MCNIFF Silence speaks volumes. Especially silences in historical memory, which reflect the values of a society as it chooses what…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH SAMUEL MILNER

Concentrated market power and the weakened sway of corporate stakeholders over management have emerged as leading concerns of American political economy. In his book, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Power, Profits, and Productivity in Modern America,…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH TIMOTHY YANG

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 mos…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH JEFFREY MULDOON

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 n…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH ALEX FLEET

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. Click here to…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH JESSICA BORGE

From humble beginnings wholesaling at a small tobacconist-hairdresser shop in 1915, the London Rubber Company rapidly became the UK's biggest postwar producer and exporter of disposable rubber condoms. A first-mover and innovator, the company's conti…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH CORY FISCHER HOFFMAN

The Empire of Bethlehem stretched from a small eastern-Pennsylvania city across the United States and down to Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, and Brazil. It encompassed dozens of plants, concerns, and subsidiary firms, and touched the lives of millio…

AUTHOR TALK: WENDY WOLOSON

REGISTRATION VIA EVENTBRITE Wendy Woloson will lead off the fall series with a talk based on her book, Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America. She tells the history of “crap” by exploring its many categories: gadgets, knickknacks, novelty goo…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH GAVIN BENKE

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 met…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH REGINA BLASZCZYK

SYNTHETIC FASHION & THE MAD RUSSIAN DuPont was in the fashion business. The industrial giant cultivated markets for its novel synthetic textiles, such as Rayon, by interfacing with the wider world of fashion. This process brought one Alexis Ureyv…

HISTORY HANGOUT: A CONVERSATION WITH PATRICIA CURTIN

WORKING RELATIONSHIPS: A LABOR-CENTRIC HISTORY OF THE U.S. PUBLIC RELATIONS PROFESSION Scholars have written histories of public relations. Scholars have written histories of labor. Scholars had yet to bring the two histories into conversation with o…

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AUTHOR TALK: THOMAS ZELLER

REGISTRATION VIA EVENTBRITE Thomas Zeller will close the fall series with a talk based on his book, Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters. His book explains how what we see while driving reflects our view of societie…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH KEVIN BUNCH

Kevin Bunch is a writer and communications specialist for the International Joint Commission and an independent researcher of video game history, centered his research at Hagley on RCA in the 1970s. In 1977 RCA released their own home video game cons…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH BENJAMIN KLETZER

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 origi…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH DAVID CORREIA

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 easte…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH MARK H. ROSE

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 a…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH IVANA ZIMBREK

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…

Author Talk: Margaret Mulrooney

On March 9, Margaret Mulrooney will return to Hagley to discuss her book—Black Powder, White Lace: The Du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth-Century America—and reflect on how it has stood up since its 2002 publication. She will trace the…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH DYLAN GOTTLIEB

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 e…

HOW FLORIDA HAPPENED

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…

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POSTPONED: Author Talk: Roger Biles and Mark Rose

This Author Talk has been postponed. A Good Place to Do Business: The Politics of Downtown Renewal Since 1945 will be the topic of the author talk by historians Roger Biles and Mark Rose. Their book chronicles efforts to reinvigorate the downtowns of…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH MINSEOK JANG

How does a movement unite the disparate interests of producer and consumers? By directing their shared ire against a powerful middleman. That is how opponents of the Standard Oil monopoly on kerosene refining and distribution joined forces to take on…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH JAMES LEACH

Cognitive changes occur across the human lifespan, with consequences for economic conditions. How people have understood these changes, and managed their interaction with life and work has changed over time. As industrialization sped up work, and enh…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH CYNTHIA MEYERS

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…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH ALEX TAYLOR

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…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH PETER KOVACS

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…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH EMILY BAKER

Artists bring a unique perspective to historical archives. Like any other researchers, they read and examine documents and collections to learn about their subject. Where their methods diverge is to use archival sources to shape the form and meaning…

HISTORY HANGOUT CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD POPP

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-scre…

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RESEARCH SEMINAR: ADAM ROME

“SUSTAINABILITY ON THE CHEAP: WALMART AND THE CHALLENGE OF GREENING RETAIL” In 2005, Walmart stunned the business world by committing to become greener. That commitment seemed to go against the company’s core mission: Its slogan was “Always Low Price…

Author Talk: Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler

Anyone who has worked in an office is likely to be aware of the open plan concept. An author talk on October 5 will place these design efforts in a historical context. Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler’s book Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office…

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RESEARCH SEMINAR: AI HISANO

"EVERYDAY AESTHETICS: INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AND THE SENSES IN THE UNITED STATES FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1950S" “Our basic appreciation of design is ultimately dependent upon what we sense through vision, taste, hearing, smelling and feeling,” argued the in…

Celebration of Rear-Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont

Please join us to honor and celebrate the recent induction of Rear-Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont into the Delaware Maritime Hall of Fame! 6 pm • Welcome and light refreshments with archival items on display 7 pm • Presentation by Lucas Clawson,…

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Author Talk: Al Churella

Al Churella returns to Hagley for a talk based on the second volume of his monumental history of the Pennsylvania Railroad. His talk, Inflection Points: W. W. Atterbury and the Destiny of the Pennsylvania Railroad, charts the company’s dramatic…

History Hangout: Clark Barwick

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 w…

HISTORY HANGOUT: TRISH KAHLE

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 United States. T…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH MOEKO YAMAZAKI

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. T…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH TINA WEI

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…

Hiding in Plain Sight: Identifying Black Inventors in Hagley’s Patent…

The United States patent system was one of the most democratic government systems when it was first established. This is clearly demonstrated in Hagley’s unique collection of 19th-century patent models. Unlike other parts of American life…

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Author Talk: Jennifer Black

Want to know about the origins of the brands and trademarks that now fill our marketplaces and media? In her author talk on Thursday February 29, Jennifer Black will tell all, drawing from her new book, Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in N…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH REBECCA JANZEN

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 p…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS MORRIS

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 n…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH AMY EDWARDS

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 c…

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AUTHOR TALK: ROGER BILES AND MARK ROSE

A Good Place to Do Business: The Politics of Downtown Renewal since 1945 will be the topic of the author talk by historians Roger Biles and Mark Rose. It is rescheduled from last spring. Their book chronicles efforts to reinvigorate the downtowns of…

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HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH KEVIN KENNY

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…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH HUNTER MOSKOWITZ

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 histor…

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RESEARCH SEMINAR: ANNA ANDRZEJEWSKI

(rescheduled from December 13, 2023) "MAKING PARADISE: LIVING IN SOUTH FLORIDA’S VACATION AND RETIREMENT COMMUNITIES" In the 25 years after World War II, the coastline of South Florida was transformed into a sprawling cultural landscape of leisure, m…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH JACOB SAINDON

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…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH MAXWELL GREENBERG

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 tha…

HISTORY HANGOUT: CONVERSATION WITH ANDREA MATWYSHYN

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 wor…

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SOLD OUT: Landscapes, Ideas, & Intellectual Adventures: The Worlds…

(You can download the slides shown here) This event is sold out. Thank you for your interest in this program! Thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest for sponsoring this event with Hagley. Thomas Jefferson had a long association with the du…

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History Hangout: Conversation with David Alff

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 a…

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History Hangout: Conversation with Sean Vanatta

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…

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History Hangout: Conversation with Grigorios Antoniou

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 inte…

History Hangout: Conversation with Madison Krall

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 techni…

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Author Talk: Rachel Gross

Hagley’s fall author talk series will open on September 26 with Rachel Gross speaking about her new book, Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America. In it, Gross explores the irony of how trips into nature usu…

History Hangout: Conversation with Sam Schirvar

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…

History Hangout: Conversation with Kara Schlichting

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, Ame…

Hagley Fall Conference

Despite the central role that real estate development plays in the physical form and geography of buildings, cities, and suburbs in market economies, scholars have engaged in relatively little research on the inner workings of its figures and process…

History Hangout" Conversation with Margot Canaday

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 ye…

History Hangout: Conversation with Stefka Hristova

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 theref…

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Author Talk: David Alff

David Alff will speak about his book, The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region at the fall’s second author talk on December 5. It is the first comprehensive history of the most heavily-travelled train line in the…

History Hangout: Conversation with Jacob Bruggeman

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…

History Hangout: Conversation with Yaxi Liu

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 i…

Industrial Movie Night at the Screening Room at 1313

Hagley Museum and Library curator, Kevin Martin, will introduce a series of films sponsored by the Hercules Powder Company at the Screening Room @ 1313 in Wilmington, Delaware on January 23, 2025 at 7pm. Tickets will be available at the door or you c…

History Hangout: Conversation with Emily Wells

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 a…

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Author Talk: David Suisman

On February 27, David Suisman will speak about his his new book Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers. Whether the sounds came from brass instruments, weary and homesick singers, or a pair of heavily used earbuds, where…

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History Hangout: Conversation with Katherine C. Epstein

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). Click to read more

History Hangout: Conversation with Andrew Robichaud

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. Click to read more

History Hangout: Conversation with Maia Müller

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 framewo…

History Hangout: Conversation with Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden

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. Click to read m…

Author Talk: Lisa Jacobson

Lisa Jacobson will speak about her new book, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition. Following prohibition’s end in 1933 alcoholic beverage producers struggled for decades to restore alcohol’s respec…

RESCHEDULED: Hagley Industrial Movie Series

This event is held at the 1313 Screening Room in Wilmington, Delaware. For times and tickets, click here. The theme for the evening is Hollywood at the Hagley. Kevin Martin, Curator at the Hagley Museum and Library, will showcase films from Hagley’s…

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