General Information

The 2012 annual meeting of the Business History Conference (BHC) will take place March 29-31 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the Hyatt Regency Penn's Landing. Rooms are an extremely reasonable $134 single and double occupancy at this very nice hotel, located right on the Delaware River, adjacent to the Independence Seaport Museum and a short walk from Independence National Park and Philadelphia's lively Old City neighborhood. Our room bloc, and special rate, expire March 7; please make your reservations before then, using the BHC's reservation page (see our Lodging section), as we are likely to fill up the hotel.

The theme for the conference is “Business and the State.” The BHC program committee for 2012 consists of David Weiman (chair), Barnard College; Michele Alacevich, Columbia University; David Freund, University of Maryland; Elisabeth Koll, Harvard Business School; and Margaret Levenstein (BHC President), University of Michigan. Local arrangements will be chaired by Daniel Raff, the Wharton School, with Wendy Woloson, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and Michelle Craig McDonald, Stockton College. Ronald Brashear will manage arrangements with the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The Preliminary Program has now been posted.

This annual meeting offers two new features. For the first time we will offer workshops on Thursday afternoon intended to assist BHC members seeking to publish their work. One workshop will focus on how to publish in business history journals, and will be led by the editors of two major journals: Philip Scranton (Enterprise & Society) and Walter Friedman (Business History Review). Another workshop will focus on how to turn a dissertation into a book, and will be led by Mansel Blackford (Ohio State University), Vicki Howard (Hartwick College), and Robert Lockhart (University of Pennsylvania Press). Enrollment for each is limited to 25. Those interested may register on the general meeting registration site.

Registration for the meeting is now open; please follow the "Registration" link to the right to access the registration site at Acteva. Conference registration is discounted for members, and it is free for student BHC members. Registrants should therefore be sure of their membership status before registering for the meeting. Non-BHC members can join by going to http://www.thebhc.org/membership/index.html, where they will find instructions for both on-line and paper processes. For those already BHC members, separate membership renewal notices are sent on a semi-monthly basis; those who have not yet received such a notice are current in their membership.

The opening plenary will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday. Organized around the theme of "Whither the Corporation," it will feature talks by Gerald Davis (Wilbur K. Pierpont Collegiate Professor of Management, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) and Margaret M. Blair (Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise, Vanderbilt University Law School). The meeting continues all day Friday and Saturday with a jam-packed schedule of 185 presenters, as well as several receptions and the book and journals exhibit.

Paper presenters, including those in the Krooss Prize session, are reminded that they need to send an abstract of their papers for posting on the meeting website. These are not the abstracts submitted as part of the proposal process, but rather a short, c. 200-word paragraph about the main point(s) of the paper. Abstracts can most easily be submitted through the abstract submission form (linked from the navigation menu) or by sending the abstract as an email to Pat Denault. Abstracts will be accepted until shortly before the meeting, but we hope to have them all posted by March 10. Papers may also be sent as email attachments to Pat for posting.

Please check back here regularly; we will update these pages frequently as more information becomes available.