April 14-15, 2023 | Princeton University

This two-day conference will explore the history of the concept of “value” in North America over the course of the long nineteenth century. It will feature historians from a variety of subfields who are considering similar questions about the history of value, but who are not usually in conversation with each other: legal historians, feminist scholars, economic historians, historians of material culture, historians of the African diaspora, and historians working in Indigenous Studies.

The goal is to construct the outlines of a new history of value, one which considers multiple conceptions at given points in time, conflicts over its meaning, and the implications for understanding economic change more generally. Select papers from the conference will be included in an edited volume, with the same title as the conference, “The History of Value in Nineteenth-Century North America.”

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Organized by: Professor Laura Edwards (Princeton University), Dr. Joanna Cohen (Queen Mary University, London), and the Center for Collaborative History (Princeton University).

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This conference was generously funded by the following: Center for Collaborative History
Department of African American Studies | Humanities Council | Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies University | Center for Human Values