In the popular stereotype of post-World War II America, women abandoned their wartime jobs and contentedly retreated to the home. This work unveils the diversity of postwar women, showing how far women departed from this one-dimensional image.
For the last 150 years, advertising has created a consumer culture in the United States, shaping every facet of American life—from what we eat and drink to the clothes we wear and the cars we drive. • Includes original essays by noted cultural and advertising historians, commentators, and journalists • Provides analysis from experts in advertising and popular culture that places American advertising in historical and cultural context • Supplies a comprehensive examination of advertising history and its consequences across modern America • Presents an extensive analysis of the role of new media and the Internet • Documents why advertising is necessary, not only for companies, but in determining what being "an American" constitutes
How are we to comprehend, diagnose, and counter a system of racist subjugation so ordinary it has become utterly asymptomatic? Challenging the prevailing literary critical inclination toward what makes texts exceptional or distinctive, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States underscores the urgent importance of genre for tracking conventionality as it enters into, constitutes, and reproduces ordinary life. In the wake of emancipation's failed promise, two developments unfolded: white supremacy amassed new mechanisms and procedures for reproducing racial hierarchy; and black freedom developed new practices for collective expression and experimentation. This new racial ordinary came into being through new literary and cultural genres—including campus novels, the Ladies' Home Journal, Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons. Through the postemancipation interplay between aesthetic conventions and social norms, genre became a major influence in how Americans understood their social and political affiliations, their citizenship, and their race. Travis M. Foster traces this thick history through four decades following the Civil War, equipping us to understand ordinary practices of resistance more fully and to resist ordinary procedures of subjugation more effectively. In the process, he provides a model for how the study of popular genre can reinvigorate our methods for historicizing the everyday.
A hundred years ago, women were lacing themselves into corsets and teaching their daughters to do the same. The ideal of the day, however, was inner beauty: a focus on good deeds and a pure heart. Today American women have more social choices and personal freedom than ever before. But fifty-three percent of our girls are dissatisfied with their bodies by the age of thirteen, and many begin a pattern of weight obsession and dieting as early as eight or nine. Why? In The Body Project, historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg answers this question, drawing on diary excerpts and media images from 1830 to the present. Tracing girls' attitudes toward topics ranging from breast size and menstruation to hair, clothing, and cosmetics, she exposes the shift from the Victorian concern with character to our modern focus on outward appearance—in particular, the desire to be model-thin and sexy. Compassionate, insightful, and gracefully written, The Body Project explores the gains and losses adolescent girls have inherited since they shed the corset and the ideal of virginity for a new world of sexual freedom and consumerism—a world in which the body is their primary project.
Offering the first comparative study of 1920s’ US and Canadian print cultures, ‘Imagining Gender, Nation and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s’ comparatively examines the highly influential ‘Ladies’ Home Journal’ (1883–2014) and the often-overlooked ‘Canadian Home Journal’ (1905–1958). Firmly grounded in the latest advances in periodical studies, the book provides a timely contribution to the field in its presentation of a transferrable transnational approach to the study of magazines. While Canadian magazines have often been viewed, unflatteringly and inaccurately, as merely derivative of their American counterparts, Rachel Alexander asserts the value of an even-handed consideration of both. Such an approach acknowledges the complexity of these magazines as collaborative texts, cultural artefacts and commercial products, revealing that while these magazines shared certain commonalities, they functioned in differing – at times unexpected – ways. During the 1920s, both magazines were changing rapidly in response to technological modernity, altering gender economies and the burgeoning of consumer culture. ‘Imagining Gender, Nation, and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s’ explores the influences, tensions and interests that informed the magazines’ construction of their audience of middle-class women as readers, consumers and citizens.
![We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life. . . And Always Has [3 volumes]](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/gI2dAwAAQBAJ)
