Consumer Revolution Research Articles

French revolution or industrial revolution? A note on the contrasting experiences of England and France up to 1800

At the end of the eighteenth century, England and France both underwent revolutions: France the French Revolution, England the industrial revolution. This note sheds new light on these contrasting experiences in the histories of England and France by looking at the evolution of real consumer prices in London and Paris in the centuries leading up to 1800. Whilst in London, building workers were facing low and stable consumer prices over the period, leaving plenty of scope for a demand-driven consumer revolution (in particular after 1650), their Parisian counterparts had to engage in a year-long grind to maintain a decent living, and often had to cut consumption to make ends meet. The exercise conducted in the present paper gives a quantitative and economic underpinning to the notion that the French revolution did not arise out of nowhere, but rather had its roots in centuries of hardship amongst working class people as they struggled to make a living.

Morag Martin . Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750–1830 . (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 127th series, number 2.) Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press . 2009 . Pp. viii, 228. $55.00.

Eighteenth-century cosmetics included concoctions to whiten the face and to cover blemishes, rouge to give the face an artificial color, powders for use on wigs or hair, beauty spots, depilatory creams, false eyebrows, hair dyes, teeth whiteners, breath fresheners, and agents for cleaning the skin and hair or for perfuming the body. Such artifice came to seem increasingly problematic in the 1770s and 1780s as moralists excoriated the deception and hypocrisy of the court and vaunted naturalness and transparency as foundations of a new civic order. Aristocratic artifice was rejected; the domesticated mother was to replace the painted coquette. Yet despite vociferous criticism, Morag Martin argues, “the commerce of cosmetics expanded and prospered in the late eighteenth century, during the revolutionary period, and into the nineteenth century” (p. 2). Martin shows that by the 1770s and 1780s quite ordinary Parisians—artisans, shopkeepers, even milkmaids—were buying cosmetics. There was a shift away from do-it-yourself recipes to the consumption of prefabricated products. Makeup was “a cheap and available way for women and men to participate in the consumer revolution” (p. 31). The manufacture and retailing of cosmetics was a leading sector in the development of a consumer-driven market economy. Beauty aids could be manufactured inexpensively, and the requisite knowledge and ingredients were widely available. Competition among guilds and loopholes in corporate regulations allowed independent producers to operate, while any product that could claim to be new was exempt from guild control. The most successful retailing model was one in which the seller established a shop and sold to a socially diverse range of consumers. Some of these shops were luxury emporiums, but modest, functional premises were more typical. Most producers and retailers were small fry, and lived a relatively precarious existence.

Ian Mortimer, The dying and the doctors: the medical revolution in seventeenth-century England, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, Woodbridge and New York, Boydell Press, 2009, pp. xiv, 232, £50.00, $95.00 (hardback 978-08-619-3302-0).

Ian Mortimer, The dying and the doctors: the medical revolution in seventeenth-century England, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, Woodbridge and New York, Boydell Press, 2009, pp. xiv, 232, £50.00, $95.00 (hardback 978-08-619-3302-0).

Was there an ‘industrious revolution’ before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c. 1300-1830

It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two ‘industrious’ revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.

A history of shopping: the missing link between retail and consumer revolutions

PurposeThis paper aims to reconsider and reframe the relationship between retail and consumer revolutions, arguing that the two have too often been separated empirically and conceptually.Design/methodology/approachReviewing a broad range of literature, the paper discussed the ways in which the historiography of retailing and consumption might be brought together by a greater focus on and theorisation of shopping.FindingsThe paper highlights equivocation in the literature about the extent to which retailing was transformed during the eighteenth century in response to consumer changes. Whilst some aspects were dramatically transformed, others remained largely unchanged. It draws on a rather smaller body of work to illustrate the ways in which shopping practices were instrumental in connecting shops and consumers, linking the cultural world of consumption to the economic realm of retailing.Originality/valueThe key argument is that, if studies of shopping are to be useful in furthering the understanding of retailing and consumption, then the paper must theorise shopping more fully. In particular, the paper emphasises the insights afforded by notions of performance and identity, and by analyses of consumer motivation; arguing that these offer the opportunity to link shopping to wider debates over politeness, gender roles and even modernity.

The Consumer Revolution: Turning Point in Human History, or Statistical Artifact?

A Farewell to Alms argued based on wages, rents and returns on capital that the English by 1800 were no wealthier than in 1400. An argument against this has been the supposed consumer revolution of 1600-1750. Since ordinary families by 1750 begin routinely consuming former luxury goods, income must have risen much faster than wages through a concomitant industrious revolution. This paper argues that the consumer and industrious revolutions of 1600-1750 are artifacts created by misinterpreting the major source on consumption in these years, probate inventories. Properly interpreted there is no conflict between wages, income and consumption in England 1600-1750.

An Early Modern Consumer Revolution in the Baltic?

The European consumer revolution has gained increasing attention in recent years. This paper goes beyond the previous scholarly focus upon western Europe in general, and Britain in particular, by studying the consumer revolution in the Baltic region in general, and Denmark and Sweden in particular. Previous research has underestimated the quantities of ‘new luxuries’ imported into the Baltic region. Disaggregating the region, the empirical evidence shows that the Danish population consumed approximately as much sugar for example as the British did, already by the late 18th century. The paper argues that this to a large extent can be attributed to the fact that real wages in Denmark were comparatively high at the time, even approaching the levels paid to workers in high-wage countries in north-western Europe. The high wages, together with a number of other factors, thus enabled an early consumer revolution at least in this part of the Baltic.

In my power: letter writing and communications in early America

Preface Introduction Chapter 1: Communications and Empire Chapter 2: Letter Writing and Commercial Revolution Chapter 3: Migration and Empire Chapter 4: Letter Writing and Consumer Revolution Chapter 5: Revolution and War Chapter 6: Universalism and the Epistolary Divide Conclusion Afterword: The Burden of Early American History List of Abbreviations Notes Index Acknowledgments

Was There an ‘Industrious Revolution’ Before the Industrial Revolution? An Empirical Exercise for England, c. 1300-1830

It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two ‘industrious’ revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.

Rome's Cultural Revolution by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

460 PHOENIX despite certain shortcomings, Ando has given students of religion—Roman or otherwise— a complex and engaging look at several aspects of Roman religion and its interaction with Christianity. University of Michigan Celia E. Schultz Rome's Cultural Revolution. By Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press. Pp. xxiv, 502. Rome's Cultural Revolution represents at once the fulfillment of a program laid out by Wallace-Hadrill in 1997 and a very considerable expansion upon it ("Mutatio morum: The Idea of a Cultural Revolution," in T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro (eds.), The Roman Cultural Revolution [Cambridge 1997] 3-22). That program in its expanded form might be regarded as having two distinct historiographie ancestors. On the one hand, Wallace-Hadrill follows Syme both in discounting the importance of mere constitutional arrangements as an index of historical change in antiquity, and in regarding the gradual integration of the socio economic elites of the Italian municipalities into a Romano-Italian governing class as the great social revolution of the late republic and the Augustan age. But Wallace-Hadrill departs from Syme in regarding that revolution as at once concomitant to, and an accelerant for, a cultural revolution, which was also a product of empire. In that revolution, the wealth generated by imperial action, however unevenly distributed, combined with the influx of luxury goods from the varied regions of the east, worked to provoke higher and higher demand for such goods. This in turn spurred the development of hellenistic, Italian, and later provincial industries to meet this demand. The result was a remarkable cultural koine, in which varied forms of hellenistic, Italian, and Egyptianizing styles and motifs found expression in local media, adapted to local tastes and modes of production, and, crucially, available in different registers suited to the economic capacities of the varied, internally differentiated populations of the (western) empire, not least the freed (summarized at 37, 354, 360-361, 436-437, 439-440). This last strand in Wallace-Hadrill's argument, the focus of Part IV of Rome's Cultural Revolution, hearkens to the other intellectual ancestor of his project, Mikhail Rostovtzeff, whose work The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford 1926), as Wallace-Hadrill observes, was conspicuously neglected by Syme. (As Wallace-Hadrill notes [442, n. 12], Syme cited Rostovtzeff only once in The Roman Revolution, giving an erroneous account of his position on a minor issue before dissenting from it.) Throughout Part IV, Wallace-Hadrill suggests that the cultural revolution at issue might be understood at least in part as a "consumer revolution": the influx of new luxury goods, and the discourse on luxury that issued from it, both enabled the use of objects and practices as markers of social differentiation and spurred the mimetic development of analogous symbolic systems in less expensive media, involving (where appropriate) less elaborate forms of literacy, as well as alternative monumental, gestural, and symbolic spaces (329-338, 352-355, 370-371). Looking back in the "Epilogue: A Cultural Revolution?" on the argument of Part IV, Wallace-Hadrill observes its essential sympathies with Rostovtzeff s analysis in 1926 of the Roman revolution as consisting above all in the rise of an Italian, gradually western bourgeoisie. This seems to me correct, and the analysis in support of that claim is exceptionally well and usefully done. (If there is a major fault in this part of the work, it is the unfortunate absence from its intellectual apparatus of Bourdieu's Distinction.) BOOK REVTEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 461 The other parts of the book take up different themes and place them within different frameworks of analysis. Parts I and II, "Culture and Identities" and "Building Identities," strike me as less successful overall: Wallace-Hadrill moves somewhat uneasily between assorted modern theories of identity, many explicitly elaborated from the study of linguistic data (bilingualism, creolization, hybridization, métissage). The difficulties are thus both idiosyncratic and theoretical. They are idiosyncratic insofar as Wallace-Hadrill seems less at home in this material—the writing, elsewhere pellucid, is here sometimes crabbed. The difficulties are theoretical for two reasons above all. First, as often, litde or no effort is made to correlate any given modern theory of identity...

Costly Signaling and Gendered Social Strategies among Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: An Archaeological Perspective

Evolutionary approaches to agency offer some of the most promising frameworks for identifying individual agents and their archaeological correlates. Agency theory calls attention to the individual as the fundamental feature of human relations, and evolutionary theory provides historically situated models that allow archaeologists to precisely investigate the complex behavioral strategies that underlie artifact patterns. The following paper offers one such model. Using data from 41 slave-site occupations from eighteenth-century Virginia, I explore how and why enslaved African Americans actively participated in the burgeoning "consumer revolution" that swept across the early modern Atlantic World. Artifact patterning suggests that the acquisition and display of costly imported goods functioned as a form of communication for slaves in both public and private venues. The data show that enslaved women and men used several different consumption strategies to solidify social and economic relationships within precarious and rapidly changing environments. Signaling theory, derived from evolutionary theory, illuminates the contextual factors that structured slaves’ consumer choices and provides a model for understanding their choices as the result of dynamic and mutually beneficial behaviors.

The Tensions of Modernity: Skálholt During the 17th and 18th Centuries

Between 2002 and 2007, large-scale excavations at the episcopal manor and school of Skálholt in the southwest of Iceland unearthed a massive assemblage of material culture dating from the mid-17th to late 18th century. One of the key questions this paper will address is the position this settlement had within the wider religious, cultural, and economic changes that were taking place over this time period, both within Iceland and the North Atlantic. Special emphasis will be placed on understanding how ideology and the economic nexus were intertwined, and the contradictions that may have emerged over time between these different elements. Skálholt led the Reformation in Iceland, but it was also in the vanguard of the consumer revolution, being one of the most populous settlements in the country before the foundation of Reykjavik as a town in the late 18th century. This paper explores what an archaeology of modernity might look like for Iceland, and in particular, focuses on the relation between spatial organization and ideologies of community which were undergoing major change at this time.

Diet Studies in the Romantic Period

AbstractThe burgeoning interdisciplinary field of diet studies examines representations of food, eating and drinking, and other aspects of consumption in literary and non‐literary texts. It emerged in the field of British Romanticism, at the intersection of materialist and formalist criticisms, and draws on food anthropology, food history and consumption studies. It also seeks to intervene into philosophy and aesthetics by revealing the corporeal and gustatory tropes that sometimes ground these fields. The Romantic period has proven to be a fertile literary moment for questions about diet. Coinciding historically with the consumer revolution, the period between the 1780s and 1830s saw many changes in diet, including the rise of haute cuisine, and the introduction of luxury foods like tea, sugar, coffee and chocolate. Dietary reformers also sought to introduce potatoes into the diets of the poor in the wake of food shortages. In tandem with this historical context, the 18th century is also known as the ‘century of taste’, and diet studies examine the gustatory dimensions of the aesthetic concept of taste. In diet studies, food is read as a sign that can demystify ‘Romantic ideology’ but that can also maintain its status as a figure. In this article, I review some of the most important works in the field, and suggest some of the reasons that diet studies has proved to be such a productive intervention into Romantics studies.

Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860 , and: Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (review)

Reviewed by: Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860, and: Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia Bret E. Carroll (bio) Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860. By Stewart Davenport. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x, 269. Cloth, $45.00.) Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia. By Ann Smart Martin. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi, 260. Cloth, $55.00.) Figuring prominently in recent scholarship, the "market revolution" and "consumer revolution" have operated as overarching models for historians seeking to make sense of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American life. These closely interwoven concepts have assumed paradigmatic status, or at least something approaching it, by addressing broad swaths of human experience and promising to bridge longstanding gaps separating [End Page 525] political, economic, and social history from one another as well as from the cultural and religious history that assumed new vitality in the 1990s. But scholars have also raised legitimate questions about the definition of these terms, and their timing, sources, social and geographic reach, and explanatory power. Stewart Davenport's Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon and Ann Smart Martin's Buying into the World of Goods stake out new, though widely differing, directions in studies of American consumerism and the market, providing us an opportunity to take stock of these models' current state and future prospects. Davenport approaches these models from the perspective of traditional intellectual history, exploring "issues of self and society in modernity" (12) and asking "what did Christians in America think about capitalism when capitalism was first something to be thought about?" (1). He identifies three categories of response, each grounded in a different ethical philosophy and represented by a different group of antebellum figures. The first group, a cluster of academics he calls "clerical economists," embraced the optimistic political economy of Adam Smith, seeing in its mechanisms the God of natural theology and in its unhindered operations the promise of American prosperity and social order. They elided the potential ethical pitfalls—made patent in the pessimistic assessments of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus—by emphasizing the scientific authority of political economy, applying utilitarian standards of human happiness at the national and international levels, excluding the United States from grim Ricardian and Malthusian principles, avoiding questions of individual morality by arguing that Smithian precepts grounded love of neighbor in self-interest, and defining desire and its gratification as natural and therefore good. This approach, Davenport contends, was motivated less by the alignment of the clerical economists with the interests of the merchant elite against radical Jacksonians than by their need to defend republican morality and God's relevance against the amoral and secular implications of modern political economy. The second group, the "contrarians," grounded their ethics in deontology and took the opposite tack; they disputed political economy's claims to scientific status, contended that capitalism encourages selfishness and sinful indulgence of impulses, and critiqued on moral grounds the poverty and exploitation that capitalism generated. "Pastoral moralists," operating from the perspective of virtue ethics, took a middle route, viewing market capitalism positively but attempting to set boundaries between legitimate self-interest and sinful [End Page 526] selfishness, between legitimate gratification and sinful excess. Davenport stakes out his own moral turf, crediting the contrarians and pastoral moralists with giving the moral drawbacks of market capitalism "the care and seriousness they deserved" (84), while charging the clerical economists with "leaving significant ethical questions unanswered" (85) and taking a "naïvely optimistic and shortsighted" (96) approach to problems of poverty and inequality. By identifying a range of responses to the market revolution, Davenport attempts to move beyond Charles Sellers's more monolithic postulate of a broad shift in Protestant attitudes from anti- to pro-market (The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 [New York, 1991]). In this, he follows such scholars as Daniel Walker Howe and Richard Carwardine, who questioned Sellers on that point in the edited collections The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville, VA, 1996) and God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market (New York, 2001...

Production/Consumption and the Chinese City/Region: Cultural Political Economy and the Feminist Diamond Ring

The "consumer revolution" in the People's Republic of China emerged after 1992 when the state deepened growth-oriented reform and justified individual consumption as a pillar of economic development. This examination of cultural-economic practices in urban China makes an argument for conceptualizing consumption in relation to production through a modified cultural political economy. It identifies a regional regime in the zone between Shanghai and Hong Kong, with the latter as China's main center of trade in precious metals and gemstones, and citizen-consumer subject formation with "Chinese characteristics." The argument builds on Chinese feminist theory to explain contrasts between PRC state ideology on women's roles in the household and contemporary alternatives in the marketplace. Empirical analysis focuses on the large market for fine jewelry, its disassociation from heteronormative gifting, and its connection with leisure/tourism sites. Conclusions affirm the importance of a cultural political economy for theorizing production/consumption relations in the city, and query evolving consumerism in the PRC.

Intellettuali italiani fra societŕ opulenta e democrazia del benessere: il caso de "Il Mulino" (1958-1968)

- By the 1950s the process of economic reconstruction in Italy was widely considered as accomplished with the welfare consumerist society starting to take hold, albeit not without its contradictions. Shifting the perspective of the analysis from the economic aspects to the socio-political ones of consumption, this essay seeks to reconstruct the debate that was developed by the group of intellectuals of the journal Il Mulino over the challenges posed by the transformation of lifestyles and culture as a consequence of the establishment of the so-called affluent society in the years spanning between the publication of John Kenneth Galbraith's work and 1968. By analysing political works and archival materials the article sheds light on the key issues of the debate as well as on the connection between, on the one hand, the issue of welfare and the consumer revolution, and space and political legitimation, on the other. It is focused on the analytical process that, starting from the reception of Anglo- American sociology and political science, would then conceptualise the standard of living and access to consumption and leisure time as an element of political legitimacy and a redefinition of the relations between citizens and government. The article then analyses the democratisation of affluence and what intellectuals like Giorgio Galli, Luigi Pedrazzi, Nicola Matteucci identified as the political formula capable of providing adequate answers to this new aspect of the modernisation process: the Centre-Left DCPsi alliance. In conclusion, the author deepens the hypothesis drafted by the Il Mulino group concerning the superseding of the "sclerosis of the Italian party system, that is the imperfect two-party system, interpreted as being the diagnosis of the Italian political stalemate and a solution to" the political issue of affluence. Key words: welfare society, affluent society, political issue of welfare, consumer society, the Sixties in Italy, intellectuals of the Il Mulino, DC-Psi Centre-Left coalition, imperfect two-party system DC-Pc

Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (review)

Beyond Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England. By J. M. Opal. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 261. Cloth, $39.95.)Reviewed by Brian ConnollyThe transition to capitalism in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has generated vast amount of scholarship over last couple decades, but as Paul Gilje has noted, most difficult aspect to articulate has been the mindset - mentality - of capitalism.1 In Beyond Farm, J. M. Opal attempts this most difficult of tasks by tracing contours of ambition in early national rural New England. Opal convincingly takes reader through transformations of ambition in rural New England as they intersected with emergence of liberalism, capitalism, nation, and modernity.Ambition was culturally fraught term in early republic, retaining its earlier connotation of dangerous passion while simultaneously being harnessed to larger, national projects of progress. As one might expect, ambition was highly gendered concept, and Opal convincingly explores this by tracing lives of six ordinary men in rural New England, all of whom came of age in early republic. In this way, Opal adds much needed depth to myriad discussions of gendered and raced nation. By tying lives of these six men to larger discourses of national formation through category of ambition, Opal takes reader through often unconscious ways in which nation was coded as white, male republic. Ambition, Opal convincingly argues, was trait open only to white, educated men.The first part of book situates ambition in four overlapping cultural, social, and political contexts: Enlightenment, Revolution, Constitutional ratification, and widespread establishment of independent households throughout New England. For Enlightenment thinkers, rehabilitation of ambition occurred insofar as it was part of constellation of ideas like emulation and enterprise, which were more explicitly civic minded. It was Revolution, and even more so ratification of Constitution, remade ambition. The new nation, particularly one envisioned by Federalists, was an extended republic required those of talent and genius to think beyond provincial confines of household, neighborhood, or even region. The nation-building project bore powerfully on experiences and imaginations of obscure and isolated people, demanding rural ambitions go beyond (14). Here, as in much of book, Opal foregrounds ideological and cultural changes paved way for later economic market revolution.Opal follows this early foray into meanings of ambition by tracing it through transportation and consumer revolutions, establishment of independent households, transformation of education, and finally establishment of new, independent professions. At all of these sites and stages, ambition was constantly made and remade. Opal is at his strongest in middle of book, where he examines movement of young men beyond their natal households and institution most formative in move - academies emerged throughout New England at end of eighteenth century. It has become historiographical commonplace post-Revolutionary family went through dramatic changes animated by romance, affection, and consent, all of which undermined patriarchal authority. Yet, as scholars such as Susan Juster and Dana D. Nelson have noted, while hierarchical authority of father may have been challenged by Revolution, fraternal authority of white males was reinforced.2 In convincing fashion, Opal demonstrates rising significance of ambition was central to this transformation, and, moreover, negotiates seeming historiographical contradiction. Opal argues a new rationale of family life emerged that lifted prospects of nation over needs of household (69). …

From the retailing revolution to the consumer revolution: Department stores in modern Shanghai

Following the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, the market was flooded with manufacturing goods. To promote sales, the department store that stressed a “low profit, high volume” model appeared in Shanghai. Sellers lowered prices to encourage purchases, and used rapid and high volume turnover to make up for lower profits. To speed up turnover, department stores invented various devices to increase sales, including intensive media advertising, open and comfortable store spaces, and free and attentive services. The new sales philosophy and tactics not only brought about a breakthrough in the retailing, but also reshaped consumer life and urban culture. The Shanghai department store evinced the social and cultural meaning of consumption in its building and inner design, its application of new technology, and its promotional activities and products display. A consumer lifestyle centering on the department store also remolded the Shanghai society.

<i>Popular History and the Literary Marketplace</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Popular History and the Literary Marketplace Patrick M. Valentine Popular History and the Literary Marketplace. By Gregory M. Pfitzer. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. 488 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-55849-624-8. The communication and consumer revolutions of antebellum America drove the emergence of a nationwide literate culture. Popular historians were part of this process, as analyzed in great, if not totally convincing, detail by Gregory M. Pfitzer in the latest volume of the Amherst Studies in Print Culture & the History of the Book. Pfitzer contends that the oral culture of patriotic orators was largely replaced beginning in the 1840s with the publication of multivolume "popular" histories by a series of novelists, poets, and journalists turned historians, heavily promoted by eastern publishers. While he draws in related material from Europe, he situates his very detailed narrative mainly in the context of American publishing. This is a work of both social and cultural history of interest primarily to specialists in the nineteenth century and students of historiography in general but perhaps less to historians of the book. The historians studied include not just literary lights such as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant but also others now less well known such as John Frost, Sydney Gay, John Clark Ridpath, Edward Eggleston, dime novelists George Lippard and Edward S. Ellis, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's son Julian. An emerging class of professional historians rejected the popularizers' excesses—which varied in degree and kind from one writer to another and are closely analyzed by Pfitzer. Indeed, professional historians ensconced in colleges often reacted against popular history altogether. They felt the need to distinguish between "objectivity [End Page 388] as a method and objectivity as an intellectual goal" (143). The novelists, poets, and journalists recruited by commercial publishers, the historians believed, needed to tone down their high-flying prose and excessively personalized opinions. Pfitzer argues that by 1900, as the professionals turned to more dynamic sociological and psychological methodologies and as the American public became better educated and more sophisticated, the popularizers lost much of their audience. In a final chapter he draws parallels with David McCullough and certain of today's academic historians. Pfitzer's study, valuable and insightful as it is, could have been made more compelling at least to readers of this journal if done with a broader knowledge of the print community, such as popular religious and children's publishing. Reading reception is only briefly considered, while libraries as a market and avenue for reaching the public are completely ignored. The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (2007), volume 3 of Hugh Amory and David D. Hall's edited series, A History of the Book in America, may have appeared too late for consultation, yet surely the first volume of that series, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (1999), would have provided avenues of thought to explore in Pfitzer's specialized tome. Similarly, a greater awareness of work by Ronald R. Zboray, David Paul Nord, and Christine Pawley would have added depth in terms of print history. Nevertheless, this is a solid and illuminating study of an area of modern thought often neglected—the popular reception and appreciation of history. Patrick M. Valentine East Carolina University Copyright © 2009 University of Texas Press

Grotesque relations: modernist domestic fiction and the U.S. welfare state

Introduction: As With a Startling Picture: Modernism and the Domestic Sphere 1. 'For She Asks Forever Only Help': The Critique of Maternalist Reform Discourse in Djuna Barnes's Ryder 2. Tortured Bodies and 'Twisted Words': The Antidomestic Vision of Jean Toomer's Cane 3. Southeastern European Immigration and the 'American Home' in Edna Ferber's American Beauty 4. Not Sentimental: The Double Bind of White Working-Class Femininity in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio 5. Siren Calls: Consumer Revolution and the Body Beautiful in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust 6. 'Not Charity Yet!': State-Supported Capitalism and the Secret Life of God in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood Notes Bibliography