Vol 3 Issue 2 2023
Spring 2023 update on Digital Business History
The Inquire Capitalism Database and other digital business history projects at the Business History Conference
By Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, Ph.D.
Digital history has transformed how historians conduct research and share their work with the public. With the rise of digitized archival collections and an increase in digital platforms available for researchers in the social sciences and the humanities, online scholarship has expanded, as well as digital projects that assist research telling the history of capitalism. The Inquire Capitalism Program, funded by the Hyatt and Cici Brown Chair at the University of Florida, has introduced undergraduate students to working with digital tools and applications which they can apply to historical research. The program also sponsored a workshop that showcased that work at the 2023 Business History Conference in Detroit to promote, discover, and engage with digital history projects and tools currently in use.
In addition to the Inquire Capitalism Database, the following digital history projects were showcased at the workshop:
MX.DIGITAL is a project that creates digital archives of statistics and maps to visualize the history of Mexico using applications like qGIS, StoryMaps, Mapbox, Tableau, and others.
The Creating Emerging Markets project is a research and teaching resource of interviews with business and social enterprise leaders in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
German Heritage in Letters is a project that collects and shares online a digital collection of German-language correspondence that sheds light on the history of migration, currently held in private hands or by archival institutions.
Blueprint for Modernity is a research project focused on telling a global history of engineering by creating a database of data from alumni lists, corporate directories, trade journals, and associations records from US, Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, France.
Business History TV is a production of the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, offering a series of short videos with prominent historians on several issues of business history.
EMCODIST is a research tool for email archives and datasets that has been configured for use on a single collection of organizational emails known as the Enron Email Dataset.
La Red de Historia Económica Iberoamericana (RHEI, @la_rhei) is an organization that seeks to promote networking among emerging scholars of Ibero-American economic history and awareness of their research on the field.
The BHC’s Collective Bibliography started in 2019 as a project to collect and share references related to business history in a more structured and organized way.
Digital history has given historians new and exciting opportunities to conduct research, share their work, and engage with the public. Researchers can collaborate by utilizing digital platforms and tools, create interactive experiences, and provide open access to their work. The showcased projects at the Business History Conference serve as a testament to the potential of digital history and its ability to make history more accessible and engaging for everyone.
The Inquire Capitalism Team also had the chance to present. Here is an introduction to the project:
The Role of Corporate Marketing in the U.S. Tobacco industry—how tobacco companies hooked customers on cigarettes for life
By Emily Bally (Fall 2022 Intern at Inquire Capitalism; Business Administration, History, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida)
The 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health revealed that cigarette smoking resulted in a 70% greater mortality rate among smokers than nonsmokers (cite). Despite federal legislation and health warnings, big tobacco has managed to maneuver around legislation by selling Americans an image of mass appeal and desire—garnering their trust and hooking customers on cigarettes for life.(1)
One of the most notable figures, the “Marlboro Man,” gained the trust of white middle-class men, enough for them to try filtered cigarettes. Prior to the Marlboro Man, Marlboro’s filtered cigarettes were advertised only to women, as filters weakened the strength and flavor of an unfiltered cigarette. The Marlboro Man represented manhood, intellectualism, the resilience of the working class, and a future toward freedom. The image below is an advertisement from the 1950s, showing a white man relieved to be smoking a cigarette in the midst of what looks like a construction project. In the advertisement are the words, “You get the man size flavor without the huffing and puffing,” defining Marlboro as a smooth cigarette for a working man. As a brand, Marlboro outgrew other filter cigarettes, and as of 2017, Marlboro holds the largest market share across brands with 40% of total sales in the U.S., comparable to 43% in 1955 (cite – CDC report).(2)
In 1964, Surgeon General Luther L. Terry concluded cigarette smoking causes cancer in what would be the rise of anti-tobacco programs and legislation intended to deter people from cigarettes, especially nonsmokers. Major legislation included requiring health warnings on cigarette packaging, banning broadcasted advertisements, and the implementation of non-smoking sections on planes (3). Yet, the introduction of Joe Camel in 1988 enticed a new generation of smokers. The Camel brand mascot, Joe Camel, was featured across print advertisements, with the caricature appealing to younger children and teenagers. Similar to Marlboro, Camel’s market share grew significantly as they ushered a new generation of young adults into a lifetime of cigarette smoking (4). As a result, the Federal Trade Commission declared the mascot an unfair form of advertisement.
Big tobacco continues to target new generations of smokers, looking for new ways to introduce teenagers to smoking. One of the most infamous e-cigarettes, the JUUL, gained massive appeal for their flavors outside of the traditional tobacco and menthol flavors. Advertised as an alternative way for adults to smoke, JUUL’s influencer-marketing strategy and relaxed age verification system on their e-commerce website proved otherwise in lawsuits filed across different states (cite lawsuit example, Massachusetts Commonwealth v. JUUL Labs). And though the age to purchase tobacco products raised from 18 to 21 in 2020, the impact of the JUUL on other e-cigarette brands, consumers, and the tobacco industry as a whole can be seen as another disruption in the push for a tobacco-free future. (5)
References
- U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. (1964). Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/NNBBMQ.pdf
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2018). Cigarette Smoking and Tobacco Use Among People of Low Socioeconomic Status. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/disparities/low-ses/index.htm
- Cummings, K. M., Morley, C. P., & Horan, J. K. (2002). The Desperate Marketing of Dying Brands: The Case of Cigarette Advertising and Consumption in the United States: 1955-2000. Tobacco Control, 11(Suppl 1), i12–i19. https://doi.org/10.1136/tc.11.suppl_1.i12
- Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. (2009). H.R. 1256—111th Congress. Retrieved fromhttps://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-111publ31/html/PLAW-111publ31.htm
- Additional reading about JUUL’s advertising https://tobacco-img.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/21231836/JUUL_Marketing_Stanford.pdf
Selected (additional) reading on the history of the tobacco industry
Berrick, Jill. “The Tobacco Industry in Transition: Lessons from Managing the Big Change.” In The Marketing Book, 5th ed., edited by Michael J. Baker and Susan Hart, 481-498. Amsterdam: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2005.
Brandt, Allan M. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
Glantz, Stanton A., John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer, and Deborah E. Barnes. The Cigarette Papers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Kessler, David A. A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle with a Deadly Industry. New York: PublicAffairs, 2001.
Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Milov, Sarah.The Cigarette: A Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019).
Proctor, Robert N. Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.