Vol 3 Issue 1 2023
Spring 2023 interns of the University of Florida’s program in Digital Business History
In this new issue of the Inquire Capitalism newsletter, meet the Spring 2023 interns .
The Inquire Capitalism Internship program offers two students every semester the opportunity to contribute to the Inquire Capitalism corporate archives database and to learn about digital archives and archiving, digital content creation, digital history, and different digital tools that are key for today’s writing and publishing in history and the Humanities job market.
Jordan Dickens
Is a junior undergraduate student at the University of Florida majoring in History and Political Science, and minoring in Russian and East-Central European Studies. He first became interested in archival research while working on the History of the Black Experience in Alachua County Project with Dr. Jacob U’Mofe Gordon, supported by the Alachua County African & African American Historical Society. As part of the project he studied the development of Black housing and business at a local level by reviewing newspapers, census records, and other primary sources and developed an interest in how digitization allows for more access to sources in an increasingly online world. He believes that digital history is key to increase collaboration between historians in the future.
With this in mind, Jordan joined the Inquire Capitalism team to learn more about digital history. Building on previous data entry and digital research skills, Jordan hopes to learn more about how digital tools like Omeka aid in creating digital resources about archives and primary sources. Additionally, he is passionate about the various initiatives of the Inquire Capitalism project, including developing the database of business history records and studying the local business history of Gainesville He believes the Inquire Capitalism database is an invaluable resource to historians both within and outside of the field of business and corporate history.
Through his various coursework at the University of Florida, including his courses in United States and Eastern European culture and history, Jordan has developed a passion for the study of the history of the Cold War. He is particularly interested in the politics of race and state repression, as well as how the ideologies of capitalism and communism informed political decisions. After completing undergraduate study, Jordan plans to pursue a Ph.D in History with an emphasis in Cold War studies, with the aspiration of becoming a professor at the collegiate level. He hopes that through his work he can draw connections between the past and present, educating others on the importance of advocating for those who have been historically marginalized within society.
Outside of his work with the Inquire Capitalism project, Jordan also serves as a Research Intern with the Matheson Museum in Gainesville, FL, working on a variety of projects pertaining to the local history of Gainesville. When Jordan is not studying or in class, he can be found reading or catching up on the latest releases at the movies.
Patrick Grey
Is a junior undergraduate student at the University of Florida double majoring in History and Spanish, and minoring in Latin American Studies. He became interested in archival research while working as a research assistant for Professor Philip Janzen. In this experience, he learned of the usefulness of online archives—gaining valuable experience working with the keyword-searchable African Newspaper Database, part of the World Newspaper Archive available through the UF Library.[1] In an effort to adapt to an expanding digital world, he intends to use online archives and databases in his research methodology for investigating history as he approaches his senior year and begins to develop his senior thesis.
Through his coursework in African, Latin American, and American History at UF, Patrick became impassioned by the history of the African Diaspora in the Americas. He is particularly fascinated by the cultural, social, and linguistic impacts of Africans in North and Latin America. Under the guidance and mentorship of historians in the field, he developed and researched this academic interest. He began his involvement in the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at UF through his participation in the Mississippi Freedom Project as a field researcher in the Summer of 2022. He was given the opportunity to travel to northern Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama to interview civil rights veterans, activists, educators, and community leaders. The purpose of this project is to document the histories of descendants of the African Diaspora that have often been forgotten, marginalized, and ignored to ensure that the stories of pain, loss, and hope do not disappear.
Patrick wanted to join the Inquire Capitalism Team to gain practical experience in historical research—using digital tools, navigating through an archive, and preserving digital history—as well as explore his own interests in Digital Business History. He wants to contribute and help maintain the Inquire Capitalism database so that it may be used as a research tool for all. Patrick is also interested in researching black businesses in Florida in the 20th century and investigating the economic effect of the Jim Crow South on black communities in the state.
Patrick is a first-generation college student who plans to pursue his academic interests in a graduate program in History after graduating from the University of Florida. Born and brought up in Lima, Peru, and later settling with his family in Miami, FL, Patrick hopes that his work will be a piece in the path towards equity in different diasporic communities.
[1] “Undergraduate Research Tutorial at Home with Dr. Janzen.” UF Center for African Studies. University of Florida, October 26, 2021. https://africa.ufl.edu/2021/10/25/undergraduate-research-tutorial-at-home-with-dr-janzen/.Catherine Hill
Catherine Hill is a third-year History major with minors in French, Teaching, and Anthropology. Her main area of interest is the 19th century and the impact of industrialization on an increasingly globalized world. She is interested in the exchange and evolution of social and cultural contexts which shape and are shaped by revolution and intellectual thought in the 19th century.
Catherine finds the story of objects and archival research both rewarding and fascinating. Her main interest in anthropology and history coursework relates to material culture and the way people understand the space around them. Piecing together the past through artifacts requires skills in content analysis, investigative skills, and of course, patience. This semester she looks forward to understanding and learning more about Gainesville’s history through an investigation of various source materials at different local archives, including the Matheson Museum Archives, the Gainesville city archives, and business archives where possible. She hopes her work with Inquire Capitalism creates an engaging space for both historians and non-specialized audiences who may not be so familiar with the fascinating side of business history.
As a volunteer and now intern at the Matheson Museum Archives, she is looking forward to applying these skills to working on and with the Inquire Capitalism Database. Catherine is looking forward to discovering the current implications of Gainesville’s past. Also, she hopes to contribute to what we know of our local history and to the methods available to research it. Working with the Inquire Capitalism database, Catherine is looking forward to learning more about the business history of Gainesville in the 20th century and expanding her skills with digital history methods. Especially, the work the Inquire Capitalism team puts into digitizing city directories, business information, and other additions to the database for further and future research.
In the last year, Catherine worked as a peer editor on ALPATA, an undergraduate journal facilitated by UF’s History Honors Society, Phi Alpha Theta. She will continue this role in Spring 2023. Next year, she will be working towards writing her honors thesis investigating the Belgian Revolution in the 1830s and the London Conference of 1839 as a battleground of liberal and conservative ideologies, while assessing their ultimate influence on international trade and social relations during the diplomatic settlements. Catherine intends on pursuing a Master’s degree in history or museum studies before continuing to a museum or research-related field.
The Inquire Capitalism Database
By Paula de la Cruz-Fernández
The origins of IC
About half a year before the pandemic made researchers turn to the web in ways we had not expected, a project to create a database of corporate archives took off as part of the University of Florida’s History Department program, Inquire Capitalism. Later, when researchers and students turned to using digital resources for their research more and more as remote work became a norm, our project to create a searchable catalog of business archives suddenly became even more significant.
Since 2019 we have worked on creating the Inquire Capitalism database, a resource with two simple objectives: first, centralize available lists – namely, the efforts by the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C.’s publication “Business History in the United States: A Guide to Archival Collections” and the Society of American Archivist Business Records section’s alphabetized list of corporate archives – and build on the existing interest to create resources to search for historical business records.[1] Another starter of the project in this regard was the understanding that corporate records are not always part of larger databases commonly used by historians such as ArchiveGrid. Other resources contain information about business records located as part of larger collections such as the National Union Catalog of Manuscripts Collections and other curated lists that researchers have grown familiar with using.[2] Though these resources are well deserving of their purpose, bringing together information about archives, when we looked more specifically for business records, the results were often limited or scattered.
Our second goal was to enhance and amplify what is considered original documents in the study of firms and markets. Companies and organizations have changed the ways they do business in the digital age, along with the documentation and original material resulting from it.[3] For the purpose of including a wide variety of sources available for researchers, we embarked on research to find not only the location of physical corporate records, archives, and museums, which sometimes could also be found in engines such as ArchiveGrid, Archive.org, or WorldCat, but also deemed key to include digitally available – data that is perhaps less permanent – such as electronic documents about companies, including company websites (old and new), digital content related to the companies’ past, media available online about each company, annual and shareholder reports available to the public, digital archives or collections with information about the companies, and a list of scholarly references about each company.
Starting in 2020, the Inquire Capitalism program hired undergraduate interns at the University of Florida to join the work of research and entry data we were doing to continue to enlarge the catalog of company archives. We also collaborated with other groups, such as the European Association of Banking History, which provided a list of banking institutions affiliated with the association that also steward archival collections in different countries. The list of banks that are now compiled in our database is not only large but also international, an element we wish to continue pursuing in the coming years to make the database more global.
Today the Inquire Capitalism database contains a list of almost 1,000 fully edited and curated entries on companies from a wide range of sectors:
| Trade Association | Agriculture | Electric utilities | Finance [used for financial services] |
| Manufacturing | Oil | Gas | Natural gas |
| Electric power distribution | Coal | Coal mines and mining | Insurance |
| Railroads | Real state | Nursing | Insurance |
| Food industry | Paper industry | Law | Accounting |
| Aeronautics | Luxury goods industry | Credit | Automobile insurance |
| Casualty insurance | Property insurance | Clothing trade | Lumber trade |
| Rubber industry and trade | Pharmaceutical industry | Grocery industry | Fur trade |
| Defense industries | Hotels | Engineering | Sports |
| Department stores | Shopping malls | Recycling (waste, etc.) | Fast food restaurants |
| Breweries | Pet food industry | Architecture | Tobacco industry |
| Commercial law | Politics and government | Postal service | Lighting |
| Convenience stores | Dairy products | Service stations [use for gas stations] | Supermarkets |
The process
As we began working on the Inquire Capitalism database we set up a search for possible digital technologies and tools we could use to make this a free and public, collective and digitally searchable effort and resource. For this purpose, and to avoid having to develop any software internally at the same time we could introduce students in the Humanities to the variety of digital tools available for historians, we decided to use Omeka.net, a “web publishing platform for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits.”[4] After we included most of the companies part of the German Historical Institute, the Society of American Archivist Business Records, and entries from the Hagley Library and Museum, we began to identify companies by sector that did not have an entry on the database. Student interns in the program have also been encouraged to research on their own companies they found more interesting or perhaps closer to their research interests. As a team, we work collaboratively on Google Sheets, entering information into an in-home customized template that contains the following fields: Name of company, digital archives information, physical archives information, key terms, and a bibliography if available.
One of the most important steps in the search is finding the right keywords for each entry. The team uses and constantly updates a Controlled Vocabulary, which follows the Library of Congress’ and OCLC’s list of authorities and also adds some terms locally when necessary. Though the main objective is to identify archival material, we also enter basic information about the company (headquarters location, founded year, previous names used by the company), which we find available on the web and specifically in descriptive digital catalogs such as http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/ or https://www.companieshistory.com/ or in published research about the firms. This can result in many relations being made between entries and among different businesses and types of industries.
The search for primary sources or archival collections usually starts with ArchiveGrid, Internet Archive, WorldCat, Digital Public Library of America, and Europeana, and the company’s own website. We also explore scholarly publications on the companies to find out even more about the sources available and also to add references to the companies’ individual entries on the Inquire Capitalism database. Once the search is complete, we ingest our data into our Omeka database, making the curated and edited information available to everyone.
As the Inquire Capitalism team continues to work on the project and make it more useful for researchers to find sources about businesses, in all their diversity, we also aim to be able to become a resource that can be used to document the current state of business archives and to understand further not only how digital technology has transformed the way business is done but also how digital tools have changed how corporate archives are accessed, studied, and reproduced. The Inquire Capitalism database is open for collaboration and external submissions. Please contact us at inquirecapitalism@history.ufl.edu to contribute your archival information or any questions or research requests.
1. For a copy of the guide please click here: https://www.ghi-dc.org/fileadmin/publications/Ref-Guides/rg25.pdf
2. See https://www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/timeline.html and the Hagley Library and Museum: https://findingaids.hagley.org/
3. Cortada, James W. “‘The Digital Hand’: How Information Technology Changed the Way Industries Worked in the United States.” The Business History Review 80, no. 4 (2006): 755–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/25097268. Hurley, Andrew. “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide.” The Public Historian 38, no. 1 (2016): 69–88. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26420756. Kirsch, David A. “The Record of Business and the Future of Business History: Establishing a Public Interest in Private Business Records.” Library Trends, vol. 57 no. 3, 2009, p. 352-370. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lib.0.0041.
4. Omeka.net is a web-based application part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media larger project Omega Classic started in 2007.