In Sinclair Lewis's 1920 novel Main Carol Kennicott decides, upon her exile to Gopher Prairie, to redecorate her house, her neighbors, and herself in an Oriental style. She chooses Japanese furnishings for the front room and Chinese costumes for her housewarming party. [P] lease forget that you are Minnesotans, she instructs her guests, into mandarins and coolies and and samurai (isn't it?), and anything else you can think of.1 For the crushingly bored Carol, it didn't matter what you became, so long as you stopped for a just a minute being a Mid westerner. Lewis's indiscriminately Orientalist fictional protagonist had real-life cousins in every main street of the nation, Kristin Hoganson says: the cozy domestic life of Americans, as organized principally by the women of middle-class American houses, implicated everyone in the colonial projects of the era. Moving beyond Main Street, she finds explores the effect of the Americans who looked at the world and asked, What's in it for me (p. 199)? [T]he United States, Hoganson says, should be seen as a consumers' imperium. Which means looking for an American empire not in the outward thrust of American power but in the receptive accommodation of American households to foreign influences. Beyond reflecting larger relations of power, each purchase helped sustain a particular international political economy. . . . Given that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a heyday of empire, purchasing imports in this period can be seen as an act of imperial buy-in (pp. 10-1). Hoganson finds ample evidence of this political purchase in the parlors, larders, wardrobes, and itineraries of middle-class Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. A woman's house was herself, Hoganson says or so Americans assured each other in the prescriptive press. What a woman put in her home gave evidence of the contents of her head and her soul. In dressing her house with the goods of the earth, she strove to convey a cosmopolitan ethos meaning a geographically expansive outlook that demonstrated a familiarity with