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Kristin L. Hoganson. Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv + 402 pps.; ill.; ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-5793-9 (pb).
Charles F. McGovern. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xv + 536 pps.; ill.; ISBN 13: 978-0-8078-5676-5 (pb).
Bob Kealing. Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper, and the Home Party Pioneers. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. x + 250 pps.; ill.; ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3227-6 (hb).
There's no place like home. In our imagination if not in our experience, home is a place of warmth, security, and comfort. It is the place to which we return, and it is where we are supposed to belong. But it takes more than love to make a home. Apparently, it also takes a lot of stuff.
Three recent contributions to the history of consumption in the United States after the Civil War explore how Americans used stuff-the amazing array of goods produced by the new consumer economy-to communicate belonging, affiliation, and other meanings of "home." That consumer economy grew out of an interlocking series of social and economic changes that made inexpensive manufactures more widely available, aggregated potential buyers into markets, and afforded workers more time for leisure. Between the 1870s and 1920s, migrants and immigrants congregated in cities, concentrating laborers and consumers into accessible workforces and markets. Businesses created new corporate structures and built mass production factories, turning out boxcars full of inexpensive goods. Railroads developed an increasingly complex national network, delivering products from greater distances and more cheaply than ever before. New techniques in photography and printing lowered publishing costs and spurred advertising. These developments and others created an expanded national marketplace in which mass-produced consumer goods, including automobiles, appliances, ready-made clothing, processed foods, leisure magazines, movies, recorded music, and more, became plentiful and increasingly affordable.1 Consumer goods mattered, then and now, and not only because their production and use impacts the environment, changes standards of living, and stimulates the senses. According to the historian Gary Cross, they also perform important cultural work, for consumer goods "give meaning to individuals and their roles in society."2
The books under review document a range of ways in which Americans between the end...