From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America 1939 1959

Abstract

Perhaps owing to their interest in issues of domestic consumption and style, design historians seldom venture into the terrain of war for their primary subject matter. There have, of course, been commendable exceptions. Donald Albrecht's World War II and the American Dream, How Wartime Building Changed a Nation (MIT, 1995) and War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War II Britain, edited by Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (Lawrence and Wishart, 1995) both explored the territory. In From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America 1939–1959, Cynthia Lee Henthorn also delves directly into that space and produces an extensively researched and powerfully argued study of American advertising during the 1940s that has considerable relevance to the current political landscape. Henthorn's research follows Albrecht's tracks and also compares with an earlier work by Jeffrey Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–1939 (Temple, 1981), which analysed trade...