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Author: Gary S. Cross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231113120
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
The victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been home to the most aggressive and thoughtful critics of consumption such as Puritanism and Prohibition. This work offers a history of how market forces came to dominate American life.
Author: Gary S. Cross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231113120
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Get Book Here
Book Description
The victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been home to the most aggressive and thoughtful critics of consumption such as Puritanism and Prohibition. This work offers a history of how market forces came to dominate American life.
Author: Gary Cross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231502532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
The unqualified victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been the home of the most aggressive and often thoughtful criticism of consumption, including Puritanism, Prohibition, the simplicity movement, the '60s hippies, and the consumer rights movement. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, not only has American consumerism triumphed, there isn't even an "ism" left to challenge it. An All-Consuming Century is a rich history of how market goods came to dominate American life over that remarkable hundred years between 1900 and 2000 and why for the first time in history there are no practical limits to consumerism. By 1930 a distinct consumer society had emerged in the United States in which the taste, speed, control, and comfort of goods offered new meanings of freedom, thus laying the groundwork for a full-scale ideology of consumer's democracy after World War II. From the introduction of Henry Ford's Model T ("so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one") and the innovations in selling that arrived with the department store (window displays, self service, the installment plan) to the development of new arenas for spending (amusement parks, penny arcades, baseball parks, and dance halls), Americans embraced the new culture of commercialism—with reservations. However, Gary Cross shows that even the Depression, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the inflation of the 1970s made Americans more materialistic, opening new channels of desire and offering opportunities for more innovative and aggressive marketing. The conservative upsurge of the 1980s and '90s indulged in its own brand of self-aggrandizement by promoting unrestricted markets. The consumerism of today, thriving and largely unchecked, no longer brings families and communities together; instead, it increasingly divides and isolates Americans. Consumer culture has provided affluent societies with peaceful alternatives to tribalism and class war, Cross writes, and it has fueled extraordinary economic growth. The challenge for the future is to find ways to revive the still valid portion of the culture of constraint and control the overpowering success of the all-consuming twentieth century.
Author: Stuart Ewen
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465001019
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
A provocative, compelling, and entertaining look at how the power of images dominates every aspect of our lives.
Author: Gary Cross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231539606
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family heirlooms handed down over generations and more by childhood encounters with ephemeral commercial goods and fleeting media moments in our age of fast capitalism. This phenomenon has given rise to communities of nostalgia whose members remain loyal to the toys, television, and music of their youth. They return to the theme parks and pastimes of their upbringing, hoping to reclaim that feeling of childhood wonder or teenage freedom. Consumed nostalgia took definite shape in the 1970s, spurred by an increase in the turnover of consumer goods, the commercialization of childhood, and the skillful marketing of nostalgia. Gary Cross immerses readers in this fascinating and often delightful history, unpacking the cultural dynamics that turn pop tunes into oldies and childhood toys into valuable commodities. He compares the limited appeal of heritage sites such as Colonial Williamsburg to the perpetually attractive power of a Disney theme park and reveals how consumed nostalgia shapes how we cope with accelerating change. Today nostalgia can be owned, collected, and easily accessed, making it less elusive and often more fun than in the past, but its commercialization has sometimes limited memory and complicated the positive goals of recollection. By unmasking the fascinating, idiosyncratic character of modern nostalgia, Cross helps us better understand the rituals of recall in an age of fast capitalism.
Author: Mark H. Lytle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197568254
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 537
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Book Description
The All-Consuming Nation examines how planners during World War II laid the foundation for a massconsumption economy. High wages, full employment, new technologies, and a rapid growth in population known as the "Baby Boom" ushered in a golden age of economic growth. By the end of the twentieth century, consumerism triumphed over communism, socialism, and all other isms seeking to win hearts and minds around the world. Mark Lytle investigates the environmental and sociocultural costs of the consumer capitalism framework set in place in the twentieth century, shedding light on both the catalysts and consequences of a national identity forged through mass consumption.
Author: Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231105797
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Drawing on feminist criticism, cultural studies, and new historicist ideas, Kowaleski-Wallace suveys eighteenth century literary texts, material object, and cultural events to illuminate the ways in which women are both controlled by and empowered through images of consumption.
Author: Gary S. Cross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231127243
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
From 'Sodoms by the sea' at Coney Island & Blackpool to carefully orchestrated corporate entertainment, this new history compares the pursuit of pleasure on both sides of the Atlantic.
Author: Tamara S. Wagner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 073914510X
Category : Food habits
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century aims to bring together detailed analyses of the cultural myths, or fictions, of consumption that have shaped discourses on consumer practices from the eighteenth century onwards. Individual essays provide an excitingly diverse range of perspectives, including musicology, philosophy, history, and art history, cultural and postcolonial studies as well as the study of literature in English, French, and German. The broad scope of this collection will engage audiences both inside and outside academia interested in the politics of food and consumption in eighteenth and nineteenth century culture.
Author: Vincent J. Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623562384
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Contemporary theology, argues Miller, is silent on what is unquestionably one of the most important cultural issues it faces: consumerism or "consumer culture." While there is no shortage of expressions of concern about the corrosive effects of consumerism from the standpoint of economic justice or environmental ethics, there is a surprising paucity of theoretically sophisticated works on the topic, for consumerism, argues Miller, is not just about behavioral "excesses"; rather, it is a pervasive worldview that affects our construction as persons-what motivates us, how we relate to others, to culture, and to religion. Consuming Religion surveys almost a century of scholarly literature on consumerism and the commodification of culture and charts the ways in which religious belief and practice have been transformed by the dominant consumer culture of the West. It demonstrates the significance of this seismic cultural shift for theological method, doctrine, belief, community, and theological anthropology. Like more popular texts, the book takes a critical stand against the deleterious effects of consumerism. However, its analytical complexity provides the basis for developing more sophisticated tactics for addressing these problems.
Author: Andrew C. McKevitt
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469634481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This insightful book explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan's remarkable post–World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could Japan's globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for battered U.S. industries, pointing the way to a future of globalized commerce and culture? While popular films and literature recycled old anti-Asian imagery and crafted new ways of imagining the "yellow peril," and formal U.S.-Japan relations remained locked in a holding pattern of Cold War complacency, a remarkable shift was happening in countless local places throughout the United States: Japanese goods were remaking American consumer life and injecting contemporary globalization into U.S. commerce and culture. What impact did the flood of billions of Japanese things have on the ways Americans produced, consumed, and thought about their place in the world? From autoworkers to anime fans, Consuming Japan introduces new unorthodox actors into foreign-relations history, demonstrating how the flow of all things Japanese contributed to the globalizing of America in the late twentieth century.
