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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2015
A generation of historians, working at the intersection of business history and cultural history, has examined the consumer culture that flourished in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In studies of advertising, marketing, department stores, credit systems, and other aspects of selling and buying, these scholars have shown that American businesses not only produced consumer goods but also created consumer desire.
1. On the history of mass marketing see Strasser, Susan,Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the Mass Market (New York,1989)Google Scholar; Tedlow, Richard,New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York,1990)Google Scholar; Laird, Pamela,Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore, Md.,1998)Google Scholar; Blaszczyk, Regina Lee,Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore, Md.,2000)Google Scholar. For works more specifically on advertising, see Ewen, Stuart,Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of American Culture (New York,1977)Google Scholar; Marchand, Roland,Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, Calif.,1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson Lears, T. J.,Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York,1994).Google Scholar For background on department stores, see Leach, William,Land of Desire: From the Department Store to the Department of Commerce: The Rise of America's Commercial Culture (New York,1993)Google Scholar; Benson, Susan Porter,Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, Ill.,1986)Google Scholar; Pasdermadjian, Hrant,The Department Store: Its Origins, Evolution, and Economics (New York,1976).Google Scholar For consumer credit, see Calder, Lendol,Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, N.J.,1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Olney, Martha,Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s (Chapel Hill, N.C.,1991).Google Scholar
2. Car, Brinkman, “Standards of Living” inThe Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ed.Seligman, Edwin R. A.,15 vols. (New York,1934), 14:322.Google Scholar
3. Brinkman, , “Standards of Living”323.Google Scholar
4. Glickman, Lawrence, “Inventing the ‘American standard of living’: Gender, Race, and Working-Class Identity, 1880–1925”Labor History 34 (Spring-Summer1993):221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5. Distribution seems an underexamined topic in American history. Although Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., advocated the study of distribution mechanisms inThe Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.,1977)Google Scholar, few historians have taken up this challenge. Few studies have examined the great shifts in transportation and mobility with an emphasis on their use in the business cycle, with the exception of Taylor, George Rogers inThe Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York,1951)Google Scholar, the chronological scope of which ends just before the period of my focus.
6. See, for example, Spears, Timothy,100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven, Conn.,1995)Google Scholar, and Sharris, Earl,A Nation of Salesmen: The Tyranny of the Market and the Subversion of Culture (New York,1994).Google Scholar
7. Wayne, Fuller,RFD: The Changing Face of Rural America (Bloomington, Ind.,1964)Google Scholar, and The American Mail: Enlarger of Common Life (Chicago,1972).Google Scholar
8. Advertisement, 1922, folder 2-100: 659.13: Kohler Co.: Plumbing, Consumer Ads, 1920–1924, Kohler Company Archives,Kohler, Wisc.Google Scholar
9. These names of house models are taken from the early catalogues of the Aladdin Companyear>, of Bay City, Michigan. See box 1: Catalogues, of Aladdin Company Archives, Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Mich.
