Letter to Meeting Participants and Attendees

February 8, 2012

Dear BHC meeting participant:

Thank you for participating in the 2012 Business History Conference annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The meeting will run from the afternoon of Thursday, March 29 through the dinner banquet on the night of Saturday, March 31. This letter contains information about submitting abstracts and papers as well as logistical information for all conference participants. The full program is available on this website. It will be updated regularly. Please review your listing on the program and email any corrections to BHC web editor Pat Denault at pat.denault@gmail.com. Substantive changes (withdrawals, time conflicts, etc.) should be sent to program chair David F. Weiman at dweiman@ barnard.edu.

Everyone attending the conference is required to register. This includes all presenters, chairs, and commentators as well as other audience members. The registration fee covers costs associated with the conference, including room rental charges, light breakfasts 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, following the registration link in the navigation menu.

All conference sessions will take place at the Hyatt Regency Penn's Landing. Rooms are extremely reasonable at $134 for single and double occupancy. You can register for the meeting and reserve a hotel room by following the appropriate links. We encourage you to reserve a room before February 25 to have the best chance of securing a room at the conference hotel at the conference rate. After the BHC room bloc at the Hyatt Regency is filled, conference participants will be referred to other nearby hotels. The hotel is about 10 miles from the Philadelphia airport.

Information about all local logistics, including hotel, registration, and taxi and shuttle service, is available here on the meeting website.

Presenters are expected to submit abstracts of their papers for posting on the BHC website by March 15, 2012. Please submit your abstract on-line at http://www.thebhc.org/annmeet/abstractsub.html. Presenters are also encouraged to post electronic versions of their papers prior to the meeting and to submit their papers for inclusion in our on-line proceedings publication, Business and Economic History On-Line. Information about submitting your paper for posting before the meeting is available on the abstracts page. Please go to http://www.thebhc.org/annmeet/behsub.html for information on submitting your paper to BEH On-Line after the meeting.

Presenters should send their full paper to both their discussant and their chair by March 15. Please also send a short c.v. to your chair, so that he or she can introduce you properly. You can find e-mail addresses for your panel members easily by clicking on their names on the online version of the program.

The BHC is committed to having each panel reserve adequate time for discussion with the audience. Paper presenters must limit their remarks to eighteen (18) minutes each. Discussants should 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 plan to use a Powerpoint presentation, you must contact your co-panelists. 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 for more information on how to become a member. New members will be eligible for the lower registration fees at the 2012 annual meeting.

We look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia.

Best wishes,

Roger Horowitz
BHC Secretary-Treasurer

David F. Weiman
2012 Program Committee Chair