Letter to Meeting Participants and Attendees

January 17, 2013

Dear BHC meeting participant:

Thank you for your interest in participating in the 2013 Business History Conference annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio. This meeting will run from the afternoon of Thursday, March 21, through the dinner banquet on the night of Saturday, March 23. This letter duplicates information on logistics associated with travel, lodging, and registration that can be found on the meeting website. This letter also contains updated information about submitting abstracts and papers. A current version of the program is now available. It will be updated regularly as necessary. Please review your listing on the program and email any corrections to BHC web editor Pat Denault, pat.denault@gmail.com. Substantive changes (withdrawals, time conflicts, etc.) should be sent to BHC President Ken Lipartito, lipark@fiu.edu.

Everyone attending the conference is required to register. This includes all presenters, chairs, and commentators, as well as audience members without a place on this year's program. The registration fee covers costs associated with holding the conference, including room rental charges, light breakfast in the morning and coffee breaks, and audio-visual equipment. Your payment of this fee allows the BHC to afford to hold its meetings. Please register on line, using the link from the meeting registration page.

All conference sessions will take place at the Hyatt Regency Columbus. Rooms are $134 single and double occupancy. You can reserve a hotel room by following the appropriate link to the right. We encourage you to reserve a room before February 27 so that you can have the best chance of securing a room at the conference hotel at the special rate. After the BHC room bloc at the Hyatt Regency is filled, conference participants will be referred to other nearby hotels. Information about taxi and shuttle service and other local logistics is available from the Transportation link.

Presenters will be expected to submit abstracts of their papers for posting on the BHC website by March 7, 2013. You can do so using the abstract submission form. In addition, presenters are encouraged to post electronic versions of their papers prior to the meeting. Information about submitting your paper for posting before the meeting is available on the abstract submission page.

To facilitate panel discussion, we would also like you to send your paper to the chair, commentator, and other members of your panel by March 7. Please make sure your session chair also has a short c.v. so that he or she can introduce you properly. If you do not already have the e-mail addresses of your panel members, you may find them easily by clicking on their names on the online version of the program.

Chairs: Please contact the members of your panel to remind them about these dates as they draw near, and contact any presenters who fail to meet the deadline to ask when their paper can be expected.

The BHC is committed to having each panel reserve adequate time for a spontaneous discussion with the audience. This means that the authors of papers must plan on limiting their remarks to eighteen (18) minutes each. Discussants are asked to prepare remarks lasting no more than twelve (12) minutes. Each presenter should rehearse his or her presentation carefully to ensure that it falls within these time limits. Chairs will be asked to enforce these limits strictly.

IMPORTANT! Every meeting room is equipped with projectors and screens, but not computers, which are a considerable additional expense. If you or your fellow panelists plan to use a Powerpoint presentation, the panel should arrange to bring one laptop to connect to the projector and upload other presentation files needed by the panel prior to your session. Macintosh laptops require a special VGA connector. It is the responsibility of the panelists to coordinate with one another. Given time constraints, it is not feasible to connect and disconnect different laptops during the session itself. We suggest that you email Powerpoint presentations to the person designated to bring the computer prior to the session. If that is not possible, please arrive at least fifteen minutes early to upload your files and open your presentation so that it is ready to go at the end of the previous speaker's presentation.

If you are participating in the annual meeting and are not a BHC member, we encourage you to consider joining. Members receive discounted registration rates at the annual meetings; student members have registration fees waived entirely. Membership includes an annual subscription to our journal, Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, and regular mailings and emails with news of the BHC and our plans for future meetings. Please go to our membership page (http://www.thebhc.org/membership/index.html) for more information on how to become a member. New members will be eligible for the lower registration fees at the 2013 annual meeting.

We look forward to seeing you in Columbus.

Best wishes,

Roger Horowitz
BHC Secretary-Treasurer