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This course explores everyday objects and consumer culture from a historical perspective, beginning with the emergence of a bourgeois consumer society in 19th century Europe and then tracing the global expansion of mass consumption. This course is also designed to teach the essential skills of historical scholarship. It instructs students on how to assess different types of primary and secondary sources, evaluate scholarly arguments, integrate historical materials into writing, and conduct basic historical research.
This book examines the origins and moral implications of consumer society, providing a cultural history of its emergence in late nineteenth-century France. Part One “The Development of Consumer Lifestyles” traces patterns of consumption from "The Closed World of Courtly Consumption" to "The Dream World of Mass Consumption," "The Dandies and Elitist Consumption," and the "Decorative Arts Reform and Democratic Consumption," in effect passing from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. Part Two “The Development of Critical Thought about Consumption” begins by reviewing earlier generations' thoughts about consumption before concentrating on the developments of the late nineteenth century.
In this comprehensive social history of the Bon Marché, the Parisian department store that was the largest in the world before 1914, Michael Miller explores the bourgeois identities, ambitions, and anxieties that the new emporia so vividly dramatized. Through an original interpretation of paternalism, public images, and family-firm relationships, the book shows how this new business enterprise succeeded in reconciling traditional values with the coming of an age of mass consumption and bureaucracy. It is an examination of how the institution served as an arena for the accommodation of the bourgeois culture to the coming of a mass, bureaucratized age.
Drawing on diverse cultural forms- novels, advertising, diaries, poetry, oral history, and mass commodity spectacle, his book chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race, and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Part One explores how Victorian metropolitan space became recorded as a space for the exhibition of imperial spectacle and the reinvention of race. Part Two explores how the colonies, in particular Africa, became a theatre for exhibiting, amongst other things, the cult of domesticity and the reinvention of patriarchy. Part Three focuses on the tumultuous events in South Arica, from the late 1940s until the current, bloodied context over national power.
This book tracks the Modern Girl as she emerged as a global phenomenon in the interwar period, analyzing her manifestations in Germany, Australia, China, Japan, France, India, the United States, Russia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. It demonstrates how the economic structures and cultural flows that shaped a particular form of modern femininity crossed national and imperial boundaries, and it highlights the gendered dynamics of interwar processes of racial formation, showing how images and ideas of the Modern Girl were used to shore up or critique nationalist and imperial agendas. The book consists of 14 collaborative and individually authored chapters, and concludes with 3 commentaries.
This book illuminates sartorial and bodily engagements with memory and time through the temporal and nostalgic potency of fashion, and what this means for contemporary wearers, offering unique insights into the fashioning of time, cultural memory, and modernity. Based on in-depth ethnographic research including participant observation and interviews with sixties enthusiasts in Germany, who relocate British mod style into the twenty-first century, the book examines the practices and experiences that are part of the sartorial remembering of “the sixties,” from hunting flea markets and eBay, to the affect of material and mediated memories on vintage wearers.
This book is the record of a series of programs on BBC Radio 4. 100 objects are chosen from the collection of the British Museum, ranging in date from the beginning of human history around two million years ago to the present day, spanning in space all over the world. Both humble things of everyday life and great works of art are included. The book is divided into sections comprising five objects each, all selected by specified time period. Each object is accompanied by an essay explaining its provenance, its significance, and what it has to say to us about the time from which it came.
This book is a guide to managing a household, and a compendium of practical information about everything from animal husbandry to seasonal produce. In addition to offering advice on a wide range of domestic topics, the book contains hundreds of recipes. This copy was reproduced from the original artifact, which contains the original copyright references, library stamps, and other notations in the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Nevertheless, culturally important, this book is an indispensable part of the knowledge base of civilization.
This book is a collection of 27 papers that provides a comprehensive overview of the main methodologies of critical media studies. It is divided into three parts, primary methods, synthetic/multiperspectival approaches, and emergent and challenging objects. Chapters address various methods of textual analysis, as well as reception studies, policy studies, production studies, and contextual, multi-method approaches, like intertextuality and cultural geography. Film and television are at the heart of the collection, which also addresses emergent technologies and new research tools in such areas as software studies, gaming, and digital humanities.
This book collects 9 essays that examine the influence of the USA on patterns of household consumption, mostly in North-West Europe in the period 1948–1965. Aside from two essays of general reference, the other seven essays are field, and usually also country, specific. The two general essays study the role of the European social-democratic tradition and the images of America circulating in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century respectively. Three of the seven field-specific essays deal with food, three with tourism, and one last essay with the industrial design of homes and domestic equipment.
This book is a collection of essays submitted to the conference held by the German Historical Institute. The chapters in this book are post-conference revisions of most of the original submissions. The essays represent a variety of approaches to consumption in Europe and America. Their commonalities suggest recent directions in the scholarship, raising such themes as consumption and democracy, the development of a global economy, the role of the state, the centrality of consumption to Cold War politics, the importance of the Second World War as a historical divide, the language of consumption, the contexts of locality, race, ethnicity, gender, and class, and the environmental consequences of twentieth-century consumer society.
This book reconstructs London’s Victorian and Edwardian West End as an entertainment and retail center. Chapter 1 explores the development of Whiteley’s, one of England’s first department stores. Chapter 2 analyzes how shopping has deepened tensions between credit traders and customers and husband and wives. Chapter 3 documents the development of a feminist-inspired commercial culture in the West End. Chapter 4 considers the roles of women as producers and consumers in the city. Chapter 5 explores how department store helped construct shopping as a visual and public pleasure during the Edwardian period. Chapter 6 focuses on the theater and expands the analysis of shopping as a form of female spectatorship.
This book collects 13 original essays illuminating the development of modern consumption practices, gender roles, and the sexual division of labor in both the United States and Europe. Drawing on social, economic, and art history as well as cultural studies, these essays consider commodities from bread and potatoes, cosmetics, home appliances, and the dandy’s suit to social welfare handouts, movie melodramas, and pornographic picture cards. These essays focus not only on the construction of gender roles but also class relations embodied in consumption practices. These essays also break the bias that consumption is individual and brings back state into the study of consumption.
This book depicts a visual history of the transformation caused by Germany’s turn to colonialism and a mass consumer society. Chapters 1 offers a panorama of the origins of commodity culture. Chapter 2 turns to the habit of producing and reproducing a distant land in the form of a human figure in the world of print. Chapter 3 describes the emergence of the masters of the modern exotic. Chapter 4 focuses on the new prevalence of the motif of the African native in advertising and packaging around 1900. Chapter 5 and 6 turn to the racialization of black figures in German visual culture.
This book examines the American Industry’s intent to establish economic hegemony in Europe in the twentieth century, as well as the irrefutable influence economics has had on events thereof. de Grazia demonstrates how, through consorted efforts, taking advantage of Europe’s struggle in rebuilding its war-torn infrastructure, and anticipation to get back to peace, American business provided Europeans with necessities as well as luxury items. Through this effort, American businesses and associations went from a minor economic player on the world stage to part of a dominant and imposing economic system able to affect economic and political change from across the Atlantic.
This primary source collection provides written and visual sources to accompany each chapter of The Making of the West. Each chapter features five to six sources, from a Mesopotamian epic to a political cartoon of the Old Regime to firsthand accounts of student revolts. The sources reflect historians’ growing appreciation of the need to examine Western civilization from different conceptual angles- political, social, cultural, economic- and geographic viewpoints. Through analysis of historical sources, readers are expected to learn details about the world in which the sources were created and become an active contributor to the understanding of these details’ broader significance.
This book examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards, the mass press, public displays of corpses at the morgue, wax museums, panoramas, and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials, including private and business archives, and working at the intersections of art history, literature, and cinema studies, the book argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society, and suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd, one united in pleasure rather than protest.
This book traces how westerns, jeans, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and stars like Marlon Brando or Elvis Presley reached adolescents in both Germanies, who eagerly adopted the new styles. It reveals that East and West German authorities deployed gender and racial norms to contain Americanized youth cultures in their own territories and to carry on the ideological Cold War battle with each other. The book examines diverging responses to American culture in East and West Germany by linking these to changes in social science research, political cultures, state institutions, and international alliance systems. Sources ranges from films, newspapers, and contemporary sociological studies, to German and U.S. archival materials.
This book traces debates about the woman consumer to examine the complex encounter between the market and the republic in nineteenth-century France. It explores how agents of capitalism—advertisers, department store managers, fashion journalists, self-styled taste experts—addressed fears of consumerism through the forging of an aesthetics of the marketplace. They constructed an image of the bourgeois woman as the solution to the problem of unrestrained, individualized, and irrational consumption. Commercial professionals used taste to civilize the market and to produce consumers who would preserve the French aesthetic patrimony. Tasteful consumption legitimized women’s presence in the urban public and reconciled their roles as consumers with their domestic and civic responsibilities.
This book approaches Postwar European History through the lenses of gender, espionage, art and architecture, technology, agriculture, heritage, postcolonialism, memory, and generational change, and shows how the history of postwar Europe can be enriched by looking to disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy. Including subjects as diverse as the meaning of 'Europe' and European identity, southern Europe after dictatorship, the cultural meanings of the bomb, the 1968 student uprisings, immigration, Americanization, welfare, leisure, decolonization, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, and coming to terms with the Nazi past, the thirty-five essays in this Handbook offer unparalleled coverage of postwar European history.
