Every summer the HOPE Center sponsors a “Summer in the Archives” program in which graduate students receive a stipend to process and create or improve finding aids for manuscript collections in the Economists’ Papers Project.
In the summer of 2013, Simon Bilo and Crystal Wong, under the auspices of the program, worked on two collections of papers. They reorganized the papers of Oskar Morgenstern (pictured at left), improving the finding aid in the process, and they improved the finding aid for the papers of Robert Solow.
In 1944 Morgenstern, along with John von Neumann, published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the book that most historians credit with creating game theory. Solow won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987 for his work on growth theory, especially the models he developed in the mid-1950s.
As Simon and Crystal report, their work in the archives will not only benefit other scholars; it benefited their own work as well.
Crystal has been writing about John Maynard Keynes and his Treatise on Money (1930). While sifting through Morgenstern’s papers she came across letters Keynes had written to Morgenstern in which the former expresses his dissatisfaction with the Treatise.
Simon is writing a paper that discusses the rise and fall of the Austrian program at New York University (NYU). Solow and Morgenstern spent parts of their careers in the economics department at NYU, and some of the documents in their papers deal with their experiences there.
“The Summer in the Archives program provides a great experience for young scholars who are interested in the history of economics,” Crystal says. “Archival materials are essential for research in the field, and hands-on experience in dealing with archives allows one to develop a sense of what materials are relevant to one’s research.”
For Simon, his experience with the program went beyond its stated goals. “The program gave me the opportunity to get valuable comments and advice from scholars affiliated with the HOPE Center. Interacting with Bruce Caldwell, the director of the Center, was particularly important in my search for materials related to the Austrians and NYU.”
To read more on the work that Simon and Crystal did, please see the post Simon wrote for The Devil’s Tale, the blog of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which houses the Economists’ Papers Project.