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This essay is the introduction to the 2022 supplemental issue of History of Political Economy, titled Women and Economics: New Historical Perspectives. We first reflect on the historiography of economics and the relative absence of women and gender in the mainstream of the field. Three approaches to the history of women and economics are delineated: making visible women economists, outlining the impact of including women in a broader narrative about economics, and analyzing gender metaphors in economic thought. We then preview and describe the nine contributions included in the volume. In the last section, we consider what is next for this research agenda, arguing that there are two important challenges to historians of economics. The first challenge concerns the consequences of delegating women and gender to a separate history. The second challenge concerns the "silences" of unwritten, undeveloped, and unpreserved work in the history of economics and how the community engaged with the past of economics should reflect on these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the roles played by knowledge brokers in the history of economics. Knowledge creation is the joint product of teams of people engaged in parallel work. Economists do their professional work, whether that involves creating elaborate theories, gathering and interpreting data, or conducting experiments, all the while creating a variety of competing narratives about the economy. Economic agents go about their daily lives creating goods and services, caring for one another, saving and consuming, all the while making decisions based on whatever narratives they believe about how the economy functions. The various narratives between and among economists and economic agents create market opportunities for knowledge brokers, who sell their services to whoever will pay. They popularize economic insights in bestselling books, and work for think tanks or with various organizations, but they are also textbook writers, journal editors, and conference organizers, all of whom jointly contribute to the edifice of economic knowledge and facilitate communication. European beekeeping is used as an analogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the history of economics during the administration of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, focusing especially on the president's War on Poverty and the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) between 1964 and 1968. Within the OEO, two separate intellectual communities developed: the first led by OEO Director Sargent Shriver who promoted theories of empowerment, the second included economists at the Department of Defense who felt existing government antipoverty policies were adequate to meet Johnson's challenge.

In this essay, the authors discuss the history of economics as well as the historiography of the field. Some of the subjects explored include the impact of social scientist Michel Foucault's essay “What Is an Author?” on the social and cultural history of the Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters; the notion of communities of intellectual thought such as the Bloomsbury group, the Chicago school, and François Quesnay and the physiocrats in economic history; and the development of quantitative methods in economics.

Latin receded as the common language of the Republic of Letters as the eighteenth century unfolded, ushering in a new and expanded role for translation. However, international copyright legislation was nonexistent, which offered translators freedom to take liberties with the text. This article examines four women—Emilie du Châtelet, Sophie de Grouchy, Clémence Royer, and Harriet Martineau—who translated political economy between English and French from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and it argues that these translators saw their work as an opportunity to contribute to the scientific conversation in their own right as they commented on the original texts and made significant and often unacknowledged adjustments to the texts. They invariably appealed to a broader audience than did the original authors, and they used the same tools and techniques as did such popularizers of political economy as Jane Marcet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the variations in the history of economics. Historians of economics have three tasks. First, they must establish the facts of history, the raw material out of which histories are constructed. Second, they must demonstrate the possibility of multiple, equally valid, histories to those convinced of the objectivity of their own story. Third, it is their duty to help people to understand the implications of ways of telling history. There is a technique in health economics known as cost-utility analysis. It is a method of measuring the health-related utility associated with particular health states that purportedly allows researchers to weight years of life by quality of life. There are at least three histories of the technique, but none of the facts is in dispute. Each of these histories carries with it different cautionary tales, different methodological preoccupations, and different implied trajectories for future development. None of these histories is factually questionable, but a historian who can help those who use the techniques understand that different perspectives are possible can, potentially, have an impact on the development and validation of a widely used tool.

Focuses on the challenges of people working in the history of economics (HET). Candidate-to-job ratio in the HET field; Need to negotiate the costs and benefits of each job offer for there are no perfect jobs; Importance of support and respect of other economists and other graduate students.

Discusses the use of biography in the history of economic thought. Several literature related to life writing in intellectual history which contributed to the history of economics; Intellectual challenges to life writing that have emerged from the scientific sensibilities of Enlightenment to the post-modern discourse; Two forms of life writing in the history of economics.