9310717 Johnson This award provides partial support for participants to attend a conference and discuss research ideas and results on the topic of "Danger, Risk and Safety: Ideas and Practices in Industrializing Societies." The conference will occur at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware. The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the museum, and the Society for the History of Technology and the American Association for the History of Medicine are co-sponsoring the conference. Penn State Press has expressed interest in publishing the papers. The conference will bring together scholars from a variety of backgrounds to share ideas about the historical construction of the concept of risk and its current policy implications and to consider directions for future research. Despite increasing social attention to questions of risk and safety, and changing conceptions and expectations about social attempts to deal with these dangers, the historical study of risk remains a relatively neglected area of scholarship. Isolation within historical specializations of labor, technology, or occupational health results in little in the way of synthetic overview of the topic. This conference will help to forge connections between graduate students and established scholars in a variety of these specialities, and to create a richer and more focussed exchange on these issues. ***
