A Destiny of Choice?

Undergraduates and nonacademics should have no trouble making sense of the arguments. . . .Most of the essays explain how consumers acted through goods to improve their lives and make sense of the world. * Journal of American History * This wide-ranging collection of original, highly readable, and historically precise studies of American encounters with goods and media offers us fresh ways of understanding consumer agency in 20th-century America. -- Gary Cross, distinguished professor of modern history, Pennsylvania State University This collection points us toward the next generation of scholarship in American consumer history. By drawing from a diverse array of approachesin particular, intellectual history, the history of emotions, borderlands studies, cultural studies, and global historythis volume shows the prospects for consumer history as a way of both advancing unique perspectives and synthesizing and consolidating emerging approaches. By highlighting the issue and the problem of agency the contributors to this volume have offered a wide-ranging meditation on the meaning of consumption in history. -- Lawrence B. Glickman, University of South Carolina

David Blanke is professor of history and chair at Texas A&M UniversityCorpus Christi. David Steigerwald is professor o f history at The Ohio State University

Chapter 1. Choice as the American Ideal: The Scholars Conundrum, By David Blanke and David Steigerwald Chapter 2. The Imperial Politics of Globavore Consumption in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, by Kristin Hoganson Chapter 3. Emotions in the Marketplace, by Susan J. Matt Chapter 4. Inconspicuous Consumers in the United States-Mexico Borderlands, by Alexis McCrossen Chapter 5. Beyond the Producer/Consumer Divide: Expert Consumers in American Home Audio, 1945-1975, by Jeffrey Tang Chapter 6. David Riesman on the Frontiers of Consumption, by David Steigerwald Chapter 7. Aggravating Autos, Gyp Mechanics and the Limits of Consumer Advocacy, by Kevin Borg Chapter 8. Behold their Mighty Hands Commercial Film and the Perversity of Modern Mass Consumerism, by David Blanke Chapter 9. Moses and the Marketplace: Ten Commandments Monuments and the Postwar Youth Crisis, by Joseph Haker Chapter 10. Unraveling the Culture of War: Global Hollywood and American Politics in the Age of 9/11, by Lary May Chapter 11. Concluding Thoughts, by David Blanke and David Steigerwald