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After receiving a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to support his study of black entrepreneurship in the 19th century, Howard Bodenhorn, professor of economics and business, enlisted four students to assist him in his research.
While African Americans were limited in their business opportunities and thus cannot be compared to the standard held for whites, Bodenhorn sees impressive examples of their entrepreneurship. But previous research has been confined to looking at isolated cases of success or examining single companies. Bodenhorn seeks a “more systematic study of entrepreneurship, a broader-based study, instead of just looking at individuals or a handful of people.”
“There’s been interesting books written about black entrepreneurs, but they focus on one or two accounts,” he explains. “These same half-dozen stories get repeated over and over again. I’m hoping I can bring another set of a dozen or so stories to the table so we can judge whether or not those stories I’ve read so many times are actually an accurate portrayal of black entrepreneurship.”
Bodenhorn collaborated with the students in two separate projects through Lafayette’s distinctive EXCEL Scholars program, in which students conduct research with faculty while earning a stipend. The program has helped to make Lafayette a national leader in undergraduate research. Many of the more than 160 students who participate each year share their work through articles in academic journals and/or conference presentations.
Qiong Wu ’09 (Shanghai, China), who is pursuing a B.S. mathematics and A.B. with a major in economics and business, assisted Bodenhorn this summer with a book project on black entrepreneurship in the 19th century. Wu selected and recorded data from the 1850 U.S. Census and then compared it with data gathered in 1860.
Wu, who came to Lafayette to learn about American culture and history while pursuing an interest in economics and business, believes the EXCEL program provided an ideal opportunity to do both. Wu also explains that Bodenhorn involves his student researchers in each aspect of collaborative research projects.
“Professor Bodenhorn is a great mentor,” says Wu, who is treasurer of Economics Club and a member of International Students Association (ISA). “He gave me the flexibility to explore. Working with him was really fun. He not only cares about the research, but also treats us as good friends. It has been a great experience.”
Three students are working with Bodenhorn in a related EXCEL project to conduct a longitudinal study of economic mobility among free African Americans in the mid-19th century. The team includes economics & business and mathematics double majors Keming Liang ’08 (Zibo, China) and Mrittika Shamsuddin ’08 (Dhaka, Bangladesh) and economics and business major Chutima “Gift” Tontarawongsa ’09 (Bangkok, Thailand).
Like Wu, the students are collecting and analyzing data from U.S. censuses in 1850 and then again in 1860 to determine trends among African Americans during the time period. Tontarawongsa, who is a peer tutor and member of ISA, Investment Club, and Economics Club, explains the project’s goals.
“We are trying to find relevant changes and relate them to the economy at that time and see what we can get out of the data,” says Tontarawongsa. “It’s important that we learn from history because it can imply something about the present.”
Shamsuddin joined the project as a way to continue the Class of 2008’s “Imagining America” orientation program dialogue. A member of mathematics honor society Pi Mu Epsilon, Shamsuddin is treasurer of Asian Cultural Association and is a member of ISA, Economics Club, and Investment Club.
“Being an international student, I was introduced for the first time to the concepts of American identity, human interdependency, and shared responsibilities of securing and advancing civil society,” Shamsuddin says. “In the summer reading The Working Poor, the author [David K. Shipler] depicts the lives, sufferings, and ironies of the poor people in America. It seems that he is asking the question about fulfilling dreams. After all, they are Americans too. So when Professor Bodenhorn told me about the project, I became interested immediately because it would be a nice empirical way to re-explore my orientation theme once again.”
Liang appreciates Bodenhorn’s flexibility and accessibility as a research collaborator. Liang is vice president of Table Tennis Club and a member of ISA and Soccer Club. Liang also conducted previous EXCEL research and was a member of the winning Math Bowl teams for the last two years.
“He is definitely a very nice person,” says Liang. “We could work on for hours as long as we finished the work [effectively]. He is very easygoing and very easy to talk with.”
The EXCEL research is part of Bodenhorn’s larger project examining the economic status of free African Americans in the antebellum South by looking at education, wealth, occupations, and social aspects such as marriage and the mass country-to-city migration. He has received grants for this project in recent years from the National Science Foundation and the Community of Scholars program funded by the Mellon Foundation and Lafayette, which supports Lafayette research collaborations conducted in groups of one or more professors and multiple students.
Other students with whom Bodenhorn has worked in his research on the overall project are economics and business graduate Shivani Malhotra ’03 and economics & business and international affairs graduate Martha Osier ’06.
A member of the Lafayette faculty since 1993, Bodenhorn is the author of State Banking in Early America: A New Economic History and A History of Banking in Antebellum America: Financial Markets and Economic Development in an Age of Nation Building. An editorial board member of Financial History Review and Journal of Economic History, he has published more than 30 papers in peer-reviewed academic journals and given numerous presentations at academic conferences and seminars. He has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) since 2001 and is author of 10 NBER working papers.
He is a past recipient of the Otto Eckstein Prize for best article in Eastern Economic Journal, Arthur H. Cole Award for best article in Journal of Economic History, and Student Government’s Superior Teaching Award. Bodenhorn earned doctoral and master’s degrees in economics from Rutgers University and a bachelor’s degree from Virginia Tech.
As a national leader in undergraduate research, Lafayette sends one of the largest contingents to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research each year. Forty students were accepted to present their research at this year’s conference.