The Business History Conference has awarded the 2018 Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History to Dr. Rachel Gross (Ph.D. 2017) (https://rachel-gross.com/). Enterprise and Society published a summary of the project, “From Buckskin to Gore-Tex: Consumption as a Path to Mastery in Twentieth-Century American Wilderness Recreation.”
The prize citation noted that “the committee has decided to confer the 2018 Krooss Dissertation Prize on a dissertation that makes great strides towards explaining the connection between our contemporary understanding of the environment and the business of outdoor recreation, a dissertation that demonstrated that even we, three urban academics who don’t own hiking shoes nor dream of camping holidays, share in the transformation of a business that has literally evolved from ‘Buckskin to Gore-Tex.'”
Rachel Gross is a Postdoctoral Teaching, Research, and Mentoring Fellow at the Davidson Honors College of the University of Montana.