• Summer 2008      No. 125
• From the Director’s Desk
• Council and Executive Board Elects New Members
• Planning for the Institute’s Future
• New Look for Web Site
• Quarterly Notes
• New Institute Fellows
• Reflections on a Fellowship
• Ad Libros
• Apprenti
• Fellowships in Historical Editing
• A Remembrance: Stephen Kurtz
• In Memoriam: Clarence L. Ver Steeg
• Adventures in Teaching: Rx for Senioritis
• Ghana Reflections
• Remembering Jay Fliegelman
• Mary Maples Dunn Prize
• Letter from Britain
• Endnote
• Omohundro Online
• Fourteenth Annual Institute Conference
• Scrapbook
• Notices

Most vivid and indelible of my memories of the Omohundro Institute conference in Ghana was a late-morning escape from conference proceedings and resort with several colleagues to the public and street markets of Cape Coast. I had seen similar settings in Accra before the conference and would experience them even more intensely after the conference in Kumasi. Never before in my academic travels had I encountered so many people brought together over the exchange of goods as I saw in the crowded markets of those communities.

Narrow arbors packed with people and enshrouded with food and foodstuffs, meats and vegetables, hardwares and softwears, notions and lotions, tools and trinkets of all imaginable sorts snaked through a physical geography imperceptible to an uninitiated visitor and a social geography that any cultural studies hound could sniff out as deep and profound. Inescapably evident was the exchange of an immense volume of goods among a vast number of people, which was embedded in the social relations of the market women who managed trade as independent proprietors. Apparent nowhere in the communities I visited were the retail consolidators that have redefined trade in western societies over the past century—no Wal-Marts, Targets, Home Depots, or Gap stores; no big boxes or shopping malls. Invoked instead were images of teeming street markets in nineteenth-century American cities or the dense networks of economic exchange I have been studying in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rural communities.

What I realized in these markets and marketplaces of Ghana is that the economic tendencies toward retail consolidation, economies of scale, mass marketing, impersonal exchange, the homogeny of malls, and the conformity of consumer behavior so evident in my understanding of American history are not inevitable and that my work as a historian has meaning in presenting alternatives to an economic and material world as I thought I knew it today. This insight is leading toward a sustained research project into Ghana markets and alternative retail marketing systems in collaboration with colleagues in the school of business at my institution who also work in Ghana. I could not ask for more from an Institute conference.