Mass Consumer Culture Research Articles

The Spell and the Scalpel: Scientific Sight in Early 3D Photography

The Spell and the Scalpel:Scientific Sight in Early 3D Photography Cheryl Spinner (bio) Literary studies has entered what might be called an enchanted turn as scholars seek to recuperate magic as a valid mode of reading. The first issue of this journal devoted an entire forum, “In the Spirit of the Thing: Critique as Enchantment,” to the current “mood” [End Page 436] of critique in the academy, one characterized by disillusionment with the scholar as heroic disenchanter.1 Critics have also begun to account for the ways in which paranoid reading practices have historically participated in a larger project of demystification. Rita Felski, literary critic and contemporary theorist of enchantment, articulates how “critics pride themselves in their power to disenchant, to mercilessly direct laser-sharp beams of critique at every imaginable object”; she notes that in literary studies “enchantment is bad magic, and the role of criticism is to break its spell by providing rational explanations for seemingly rational phenomena.”2 Felski’s use of “laser-sharp beams” targets the sterile scientism of surgical precision that appears to be incompatible with enchanted, spellbound modes of reading. Simply put, the spell and the scalpel cannot coexist. Felski correctly uncloaks the distrust of magic as a method in literary scholarship that trains critics into surgeons of the word with lancets in hand, not analytic necromancers. This essay, however, argues that enchantment does not preclude precision or critical reading practices; rather, enchanted modes of reading can actually enable such sustained and critical attention. I return to the nineteenth century—specifically, to the invention of stereoscopic imaging—to show how even the most distinctly hypnotic visual technology of the 3D photograph enables at once enchantment and incisive critical attention. Mass consumer culture, as exemplified by still and motion pictures, has historically been diagnosed as containing mediums that mystify the masses.3 By such a diagnosis, 3D visual culture is the ultimate mystifier, lulling the passive masses into trances as 3D glasses construct illusory realities before their eyes. Yet, viewed through a different critical lens, the mesmerizing power of the stereograph’s ocular illusions can actually promote close and attentive looking that sustains critical engagement. Excavating a history of stereoscopic sight, I argue, will help retrain the way we think, see, and read in both the humanities and the sciences, particularly as scholars begin to question Max Weber’s story of modernity, which pivots on the progressive disenchantment of the world.4 Oliver Wendell Holmes—the noted nineteenth-century physician, writer, and inventor of the Holmesian stereoscope, the most popular handheld 3D viewing device of the century—is a crucial player in the early history of three-dimensional photography and, by extension, an important theorist of enchantment. Holmes’s midcentury work on stereography showcases how enchanted modes of sight could actually engender more immersive powers of analysis. Braiding the nineteenth and twenty-first [End Page 437] centuries together, I read Holmes’s theories of enchantment alongside and with Felski’s to argue that enchanted modes of reading can actually enable more enveloping powers of analysis. A warning, however, as we shall see: when stereographic sight is hyperfeminized in Holmes’s novel, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (1861), scientific and supernatural sight unravel into separate and competing strains. Isolating the enchanted from the scientific reinstates gendered divisions of knowledge, wherein mystical reading practices are aligned with the feminine and precise scientism is aligned with the masculine. The Nineteenth Century, in 3D Three-dimensional phantom images inhabit the ocular field of nineteenth-century visual technologies. Visual landscapes of this kind were made possible by the theoretical work of the inventor and scientist Charles Wheatstone.5 In his experiments with two-dimensional geometric shapes Wheatstone successfully simulated three-dimensionality by inventing the stereoscope, a device that artificially merged twin two-dimensional line drawings into one three- dimensional geometric shape. In doing so, Wheatstone discovered what I call the “binocular trick”—namely, that the mind could be deceived into believing it is receiving a fictive three-dimensional image. Wheatstone published his discovery in 1838, one year before Daguerre revealed his method for fixing images on mirror plates. By the midcentury, stereoscopy would enter the realm of the...

Selling the sole: media, mysticism, and the marketing of barefoot-inspired athletic footwear

Shoe manufacturers reacted to the barefoot subculture of distance running that would proliferate in the mid-1990s by producing and aggressively marketing the ‘minimalist’ shoe. To overcome the paradox of selling a shoe that mimics running without footwear, we argue that shoe companies co-opt many of the symbols and identities that characterize the oppositional character of the barefoot running subculture. Our analysis seeks to identify the methods through which this process takes place in video advertisements for minimalist running shoes, focusing specifically on New Balance's campaign for the Minimus featuring ultramarathon champion Anton Krupicka. This lucrative market has in effect mainstreamed the concept of barefoot running – a movement with roots tracing back to the 1970s – into mass consumer culture, a process that has commoditized its original principles of mysticism and anti-materialism to promote minimalist shoes.

The Past, Present, and Future of the American Left

The Past, Present, and Future of the American Left

English

This paper evaluates the relationship between the and consumer preferences, and investigates its possible implementation into market offer. Due to the increasingly diverse offer to which consumers are exposed, each detail of the offer should be in the function to attract consumer’s attention. These requirements increase the importance of design. Package design should facilitate the raise of 'usual' products to the level of 'unusual' products. Different forms of frontal sides of packages were created in the proportion of the golden ratio for research purposes. By setting simplegeometric shapes, with the absence of colors and other elements which may distract consumer’s attraction, a solution was created with the aim to direct the attention to proportional ratio of both the package form and graphical solution, instead of other visual elements. The achievement of commercial as simultaneous effect of aesthetic beauty and economic good is also important from the aspect of our study. It is about different effects, products, services and relationships in mass consumer culture. This research offers answers to the question of consumer preferences related to package design based on the proportion of the golden ratio. Key words: Marketing, consumer behavior, the golden ratio, preferences.

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania

The “Famous Mrs. Barry”: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity

The “Famous Mrs. Barry”: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity Kate C. Hamilton (bio) In September 1675, the seventeen-year-old actress Elizabeth Barry performed as the maid Draxilla in Thomas Otway’s Alcibiades. Despite her minor role in the production, the young ingénue managed to attract attention—of exactly the wrong sort. As Thomas Davies explains in Dramatic Miscellanies (1784), “Mrs. Barry had an excellent understanding, but not a musical ear; so that she could not catch the sounds or emphases taught her; but fell into a disagreeable tone, the fault of most young stage-adventurers.”1 According to the famous actor Colley Cibber, the career of the late-seventeenth-century’s most famous tragedienne nearly ended before it began. He wrote in his 1740 memoir, “There was, it seems, so little Hope of Mrs. Barry, at her first setting out, that she was, at the end of the first Year, discharg’d the Company, among others, that were thought to be a useless Expence to it.”2 Despite this initial failure, Barry returned to the Duke’s Company within the production year, giving a successful performance as Queen Isabella in the Earl of Orrery’s Mustapha (1676). As the eighteenth-century theater historian and Barry biographer, Edmund Curll, explains: The first Night she played the Hungarian Queen … The very Air she appeared with, in that distressed Character, moved them [End Page 291] with Pity, preparing the Mind to greater Expectations, but when she spoke these Words to the insulting Cardinal, My Lord, my Sorrow seeks not your Relief; You are not fit to judge a Mother’s Grief: You have no Child for an untimely Grave, Nor can you lose what I desire to save. … these Passions were so finely expressed by her, that the whole Theatre resounded with Applauses …3 Barry’s emotional range—and especially her use of pathos—particularly inspired her late-seventeenth-century public acclaim. According to the prompter for the Duke’s Company, John Downes, Barry’s tragic roles in The Orphan (1680), Venice Preserv’d (1682), and The Fatal Marriage (1694) “gain’d her the Name of Famous Mrs. Barry, both at Court and City.”4 In these pathetic and “she-tragedies” of the 1680s and 1690s, she played fallen aristocrats, rape victims, and other striking embodiments of gender, class, and sexuality that became central to her stage persona. At the same time, her cultural visibility was doubly enhanced through her personal relationship with John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, a court libertine whose own notorious “performances” gained him another sort of public notice. How might have Barry’s relationship with Rochester impacted her performance and reception in tragic roles? In other words, how did Barry’s ties to Rochester impact her celebrity persona in the late-seventeenth century? We can understand Barry’s celebrity according to what Chris Rojek calls “cultural impact,” or “being talked about” in overlapping networks of theatergoers, playwrights, court figures, and players.5 This expansive definition of celebrity allows us to contextualize the phenomenon within the pre-1700 emergent print culture and to treat Barry as more than an object of interest, but also as a partial agent, in the construction of her public image. Though numerous scholars have recognized Barry’s impact upon the London stage by linking her with larger cultural and historical narratives on performance and gender, few have considered her celebrity strategy within a Restoration context. This is largely because our modern definition of celebrity is at least implicitly dependent upon a mass consumer and mass print culture to disseminate images of and interest in a famous figure. It is true that there were vastly more print sources in circulation after 1700, and contemporary scholars have successfully explored celebrity in relation to later actresses like Colley Cibber, Sarah Siddons, and Fanny Kemble.6 But assuming that celebrity depends on some tipping point in the [End Page 292] number of print media in a culture may overplay the material, quantifiable features of fame and “being talked about.” As Joseph R. Roach has argued, the concept of celebrity forms a “strand, thin but bright, [which] connects the Stuart Restoration and the theater it launched...

Culture of use leisure time

A man, as a social being, has to change constantly through the adoption and creation of new achievements of modern civilization. To even make it possible, one must organize one's time so that it is put in function of one's permanent development. The author has found, by analysing relevant literature, that the role of the individual in the leisure time in today's society is largely reduced to the consumer role. It was found that the eminent experts agree with the fact that the need for personal development and self-realisation through creative expression, which includes active participation in family social, sports and other activities, is given less opportunity for expression and development. The mass consumer culture vocally promotes consumption of trash and kitsch, which is reflected in the dominance of objects in the system of value, while the genuine cultural values are depreciated. Leisure time, as one of the key factors to the development of young people, must be in function of making a person capable to critically evaluate cultural values, but also their own cultural consumption, participation and creativity in the cultural sphere.

Langston Hughes’s “Rejuvenation Through Joy”: Passing, Racial Performance, and the Marketplace

This essay reads Langston Hughes’s “Rejuvenation Through Joy,” a satirical tale of passing from his short story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934), to explore how racial authenticity is produced and capitalized upon within mass-consumer culture in the interwar period. I argue that “Rejuvenation” offers a critique of racial capitalism in the age of the modern assembly-line by demonstrating the ways that race intersects with labor markets, class relations and commodity culture. In this capacity, “Rejuvenation” portends contemporary narratives of race, shedding light on the intersection of popular discourses of colorblindness, post-raciality and racial authenticity in the post-9/11 moment.

Iran's Karaj Dam Affair: Emerging Mass Consumerism, the Politics of Promise, and the Cold War in the Third World

AbstractThis paper examines two intertwined processes that shaped post-war Tehran. One was a ravenous demand for electricity, part of a surge in popular expectations for consumer goods and higher standards of living. The other was the construction of the Karaj Dam to meet that demand. Consumerist expectations, especially among Tehran's bourgeoning middle classes, developed together with a West-centered but ultimately global maturation of mass consumer culture, with the cultural Cold War, and with the shaky post-1953 regime's politics of promising higher living standards. The Karaj Dam became possible when that regime frightened its patron—the U.S. administration that dreaded Soviet influence—into helping pay for the project despite reservations in the U.S. Congress and among technical specialists. The dam was not simply a top-down state (or U.S.) project—it was also caused by and in that sense belonged to Tehranis. I draw on archival and published primary sources, images, and secondary literature to tell a story of society-state and domestic-global interactions that characterized many Third World countries. This paper builds on past studies of relationships between the Cold War and Third World development, and of the transnational history of development/modernization. But it transcends their focus on elites, and that of other scholars’ on subaltern victims, and argues that analyses of Third World development and the Cold War must include the middle classes and, conceptually, social history.

Mass Migration and the Mass Society: Fordism, Immigration Policy and the Post‐war Long Boom in Canada and Australia, 1947–1970

AbstractThe immediate post‐war period was defined by shifts in capitalism's socioeconomic and institutional underpinnings. Commonly known as Fordism, until the early‐1970s models of standardized industrial mass‐production and robust state planning and intervention were relatively successful in maintaining secular growth in employment, productivity and demand as well as establishing the national economy and society as unified, governable fields. This paper considers how migration controls in Canada and Australia enhanced and extended such arrangements. In simultaneously boosting production and demand, diversifying and integrating industrial activities and assimilating European migrants into a mass consumer culture while excluding non‐Europeans perceived as disruptive of material and sociocultural homogeneity, such policies provided central vectors of economic and cultural nationalism that complemented other monopolistic and redistributive interventions.

The archaeology of consumer culture

Sifting through America's historical archaeological record to trace the evolution of consumer culture, the author explores the social and economic dynamics that have shaped American capitalism from the rise of mass production techniques of the eighteenth century to the unparalleled dominance of twentieth-century mass consumer culture.

Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century Brian Tucker Lynne Tatlock, ed., Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. 345 pp. In her brisk, synoptic introduction to this collection, Lynne Tatlock surveys the enormous changes that German publishing underwent in the years between the “reading revolution” of the Enlightenment and the Weimar Republic. The publishing industry expanded rapidly, as did literacy and the demand for reading material; advances in printing technology lowered the cost of books and made periodicals available to ever larger markets, while the number of bookstores, lending libraries, and reading groups increased. All of which is to say that, from the perspective of publishing and reading, the long nineteenth century in Germany was a time of upheaval, advancement, and exponential growth. The period clearly offers rich material for investigations into the history of books and print media, material that the anthology’s eleven essays all take advantage of in various ways. Tatlock summarizes the volume’s approach, writing that the contributors present “multiple ways of contextualizing literary production, of examining the pressures on publishing, writing, and reading and their consequences” (17). The focus falls less on literature per se than on the production (and consumption) of literature, particularly in its social and historical context. A “book” here means not only a novel or repository of ideas but also a material commodity, and “reading” frequently describes the exercise of purchasing power. The volume’s perspective is informed by cultural studies, historicizing interpretations, and sociological approaches to literature; its contributors aim more often to contextualize than to generate close readings of texts. Matt Erlin, for example, does not “interpret,” in a narrow sense, Wieland’s Musarion, but his article on luxury editions does something else and does it well: it has much to say about Musarion’s material appearance, how market forces shaped that appearance, and how such luxury editions served as signifiers of conspicuous consumption. In general, “book history” in this lucid and wide-ranging collection refers not only to the history of books, but also to the study of history via books, that is, to an exploration of the ways in which books and publishing both reflect and participate in cultural history. By this token, the individual case studies best fulfill the anthology’s promise when they connect the details of their cases to broader issues or scholarly debates in book history. Jeffrey Sammons does this successfully, by using Heine’s relationship with his publisher to challenge widely held views of Heine’s politics, as do Katrin Völkner, by casting the popular “Blaue Bücher” as a window onto the overlapping realms of Bildung and mass consumer culture, and Theodore Rippey, by reading Tucholsky’s Schloss Gripsholm as a commentary on the commodification of reading. By far, though, the book’s two most important angles for contextualizing literary production are the solidification of national identity and gender. The focus on the “reading nation” is particularly prominent in the book’s first section. Erlin, for instance, examines the notion of the publisher as patriot, whose luxurious editions set German book production on par with that of other European countries. And Kirsten Belgum’s piece on the Brockhaus encyclopedias presents an engaging comparison of the 1820 and 1880 editions, in which changes from one edition to the next reflect shifts in German attitudes. To cite but one example: whereas the earlier edition discusses art produced by “die deutschen Völker,” the [End Page 303] later edition opts for the singular “Volk” (98). Together the emendations present a narrative of national progress, affirmation, and consolidation. Tatlock’s study of popular illustrated novels examines the intertwining of nationalism and gender and shows how works that affirm gender roles and the values of domesticity also affirm the nation’s values. Her piece has an added advantage: it chooses to discuss novels beyond the academic literary canon and, in doing so, moves the study of book history closer to works that were widely read in their day. Indeed, one of the volume’s strengths is that it applies the work of...

The Paradoxical Unity of Chicago and Modern Boy

This essay investigates how the interconnected nature of popular culture provides apt illustrations to reveal the ambivalent nature of modernity. I argue that the notion of modernity and popular culture emerged together in the early twentieth century in both the cities of Gyeongsung (old name of Seoul, Korea) and Chicago when technology and mass consumer culture were promoted over the world. Also, I examine how popular culture represents a complex of mutually-interdependent perspectives and values that influence society and its institutions in various ways as the image of modernity continues to build in the contemporary era. For this argument, I comparatively consider two movies released in 2002 and 2008 that exemplify the complexities of modernity in Chicago and Gyeongsung of the 1920s and 30s: Chicago and Modern Boy. Ultimately, this essay pays attention to how popular culture devotes itself to other images or narratives instead of referring to the real world and its output revisits the contemporary or past times in other places, being a means to produce and reproduce the accumulated images of the modern which shapes ceaseless simulacra of modernity over complexities of modernity.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

ABSTRACTRoland Barthes's 1957 collection of essays, Mythologies, was one of the first critical reflections on postwar popular culture. Barthes's concise analyses of contemporary French culture and accompanying theoretical essay had a profound influence on a variety of fields, including design studies. For design critics and practitioners alike, Mythologies helped shape an understanding of how designed artifacts operate in a mass consumer culture: less as functional objects and more as metaphoric vehicles of collective desire. Barthes's critical interventions are particularly pertinent in the early twenty-first century as a provocative inter-disciplinary model for contemporary design studies. This article begins with a discussion of Barthes's intellectual foundations for Mythologies and a consideration of the work in its original context. It then adapts Barthes' techniques in order to examine the myth of global digital determinism embodied in the recent One Laptop per Child project.

Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing 1950–1990 (review)

Reviewed by: Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing 1950–1990 Nancy Tomes Pamela E. Pennock . Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing 1950–1990. Drugs and Alcohol: Contested Histories. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. viii + 282 pp. Ill. $36.00 (ISBN-10: 0-87580-368-7, ISBN-13: 978-0-87580-368-5). In 1987, Strom Thurmond, the staunchly conservative senator from South Carolina, gave a highly publicized speech in favor of a federal ban on liquor advertising. Surrounded by enlargements of Anheuser Busch beer ads featuring the canine character "Spuds MacKenzie," Thurmond explained why his fervent belief in free market principles had been tempered by concerns about alcohol's deleterious effect on the young. "I am fully cognizant of the free speech rights of the alcohol beverage industry," he said, "but what is the cost to society of this freedom to advocate unlawful teenage drinking?" (p. 5). In this very fine first book, Pamela E. Pennock puts the so-called new temperance movement of which Strom Thurmond was a part in historical context. Advertising Sin and Sickness chronicles how three generations of activists have tried to get advertising bans on "the two most advertised licit drugs" in America, namely alcohol and tobacco (p. 8). After an overview of Prohibition and its legacies, she begins with an account of a series of congressional hearings held between 1947 and 1958 on the subject of alcohol advertising bans. Having failed to stop the manufacture and sale of alcohol, church-based temperance groups now returned to Washington, D.C., hoping to get government restrictions on its marketing, but they had little success. As Pennock shows, social drinking gained widespread acceptance in the prosperous 1950s, and liquor, beer, and wine makers shrewdly used voluntary advertising codes and public relations campaigns to position their products as a "normal and benign" part of American life (p. 37). Less than a decade later, a secular coalition of public health experts came before Congress seeking limits on cigarette advertising. Using arguments couched in epidemiology rather than morality, they had greater success, getting Congress to approve first warning labels on cigarette packages, in 1965, and then a ban on television and radio advertising, in 1969. To be sure, many antitobacco advocates viewed both warning labels and media bans as fig-leaf measures that allowed manufacturers to continue selling a life-threatening product. But antialcohol advocates [End Page 811] envied these accomplishments, and borrowing from the antitobacco movement's methods, they tried again in the 1980s to get advertising bans on alcohol. Emphasizing health risks rather than moral issues, they achieved a small victory in the form of the 1988 law requiring a warning label on alcohol packaging but failed to get broadcast bans similar to those imposed on tobacco advertising. As Pennock shows, marketing-control movements have had limited results due both to industry resistance and political ambivalence toward their ends. With alcohol as well as tobacco, temperance advocates have had their greatest success by focusing on the harms presented to underage consumers. Although they are reluctant to deprive adult consumers of their "right" to drink and smoke, politicians have been more willing to enact restrictions on advertising to children and youth. Likewise, manufacturers have learned the public relations cost of appearing to court young consumers too directly. The Spuds MacKenzie story is a case in point. Although the new temperance advocates failed to get their advertising ban, they did put Anheuser Busch on the defensive about the Spuds MacKenzie campaign, which was dropped after 1992. By comparing several generations of policy debate centered on advertising bans, Pennock illuminates three very important historical problems. First, she tracks the evolution from the old to the new temperance movements, showing how nineteenth-century concerns with morality were gradually displaced by the "rise of secular moralities that valued physical and psychological health" (p. 6). Second, she analyzes the ideological work required to create an exception to the right to free commercial speech. Marketing-control movements obtained what traction they did by appealing to growing concerns about mass consumer culture in general and its impact on the young in particular. Finally, by comparing...

Invisible Cities, Visible Cinema: Illuminating Shadows in Late Film Noir

The visible, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has taught us, always involves the invisible; what we see entails a zone of the not-seen.1 Seventies film theory too frequently thought of cinema as exemplifying the glare (or frenzy) of the visible, devoted to the lure of visual mastery. This led to a simplification of cinema’s ideological role as propping up the viewer’s investment in a visual image as the product of a gaze. However, such analysis too often celebrated the insight of the analyst over the complicity of the medium, rather than offering a detailed exploration of cinema’s complex stylistic interaction within modern visual culture. Cinema also offers an exploration of the vulnerability and limitation of vision. As an art of the visible, film must necessarily become an art of the invisible. This essay explores the cinematic portrayal of urban space, a theme by now well established in the field of film studies. But by exploring both the style and thematics of cinematic cities within a dialectic of vision that sees vision as specific, limited, embodied and also shaped by social and historical contexts, I hope to show that the visible city shadows an invisible city, not simply as a formal device, but as an essential structure of our modern environment. The visible twines about the invisible, not only in film style, but in our experience of the modern urban environment. For that reason cinema supplies one of the richest means of portraying, exploring and – ultimately – understanding the city. In the century that stretches from the late 1840s to 1950 new technologies transformed urban spaces and redefined modern visual experience. The invention of photography, the rise of mass media (from newspapers, to film, to television), the new visual modes of mass marketing and consumer culture (from the omnipresent advertising

Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture Betty Houchin Winfield Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture. By Bruce Lenthall. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. 2007. Radio's America offers a critical media analysis about the loss of individual expression, resulting in homogenization of public messages. By blurring the lines between the individual and mass culture, Bruce Lenthall argues, radio's power diminishes individual autonomy within that mass communication system. Lenthall contends that broadcasting structure does not allow for competing stations or diverse voices (33). As a critical broadcast history of one decade, the research context within the big picture of radio history is missing. Broadcast historians Christopher Sterling, et al. (Stay Tuned 2002) contend that by the 1930s, radio programming was half national and half local (180) and that by 1938, an FCC report found that 50 to 70 percent of programming came from networks, with 52 percent of it music. Lenthall focuses only on the narrative elite programming. While he gives an admirable synthesis of the negative responses to racial stereotyping in "Amos 'n' Andy" and the lack of network access for talented Langston Hughes, Lenthall ignores the network African American musicians: Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Paul Robeson, etc. Radio's America misses how local radio programming served American communities, college campuses, and farms with local events, regional music, sports, morning wake-ups, religious services, and crop reports. Nor is the programming of the joint station and newspaper local ownership discussed. Rather, Lenthall follows the capitalist critique of James Rorty and Ruth Brindze, that the near monopoly of the networks served the interests of corporate capitalism. The author expounds on the creative dramas of Orson Wells and Archibald MacLeish, but more as aberrations, and sticks to the premise that advertising limits artistic speech (205) by network obsession with listener numbers. With easy redistribution of identical cultural forms, radio reached a largely undifferentiated audience as one. The majority preferences impacted the individual, whether politically or sociologically, as Alexis de Tocqueville found earlier. Lenthall refers to Roosevelt's two broadcast goals. FDR did indeed initially use radio as a way to distribute information, reassure, and give hope to the nation crippled by the economy. Yet, without evidence Lenthall also writes that Roosevelt's "belief" (87) was that radio could enable him "to enhance his political power." By World War II, FDR's [End Page 138] administration relied on radio more in paradoxical ways: simultaneously empowering and manipulative. Lenhall states that 1930s radio changed America to a narrow, mass consumer culture that also limited liberal democracy in contemporary life. Rather, radio was just one of the twentieth century mass media forms; earlier, mass magazines filled with national advertising also built a consumer culture. Specific chapters cover public intellectuals' responses to radio, audiences' personal reactions to particular programs, and participatory radio democracy by Roosevelt and other broadcast champions. Most useful are chapter summations of early radio research and major radio writers' artistic efforts. The extensive primary research is impressive. Yet, without context and placement the author goes too far: the "interconnected and vast society of the twentieth century made older notions of participatory and local democracy seem nonsensical" (7). This belies Robert Putnam's social capital findings of twentieth-century community civic engagement (Bowling Alone 2000) and the higher voter turnout statistics in the 1936 and 1940 elections. Betty Houchin Winfield University of Missouri, Columbia Copyright © 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association

Growing Up Between Two Worlds

Growing Up Between Two Worlds Crista DeLuzio (bio) Melissa R. Klapper . Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007. xix + 219 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $27.50. The children of immigrants who came to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Melissa R. Klapper asserts, bore "the twin burdens of living as symbols and as individuals" (p. 179). As symbols, immigrant children embodied nativists' fears of race suicide, economic competition, and national degeneration; Progressive reformers' hopes for social progress and social order; and immigrant parents' expectations for the survival and success of the family and ethnic community. As individual "real people," immigrant children experienced the transformative forces of immigration, industrialization, and urbanization at the turn of the twentieth century (p. 182). They also actively participated in the economic, social, and cultural lives of their families and urban and rural communities, thereby playing a vital role in forging the United States into a modern nation. Klapper's new book deftly examines both of these dimensions of the lives of turn-of-the-century immigrant children. No history of the modernizing of America is complete, she convincingly argues, without an exploration of the ways in which immigrant children contributed to the larger processes of social change unfolding all around them. Close to twenty-five million immigrants came to the United States between 1880 and 1925, as part of one of the largest and most consequential movements of peoples across the globe in world history. Klapper is interested in the child migrants who were among that number, as well as those who were born in the United States to immigrant parents. Her first book, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 (2005), offered an original and in-depth look at the experiences with cultural persistence and adaptation of one group of immigrant children. In her more recent work, Klapper broadens her scope, comparing and synthesizing the experiences of children from the range of locations from which immigrants at the turn of the century embarked on their journeys—eastern and southern Europe, Mexico, Canada, and East Asia. The literature on the history of turn-of-the-century immigration to the United States, [End Page 566] as well as of specific ethnic groups, is voluminous, as Klapper acknowledges in her bibliographic essay. Previous scholars have certainly recognized that children were part of this story, but Klapper is among the first to take these "small strangers" as her primary concern. In doing so, she builds on and contributes to the approach of scholars working in the burgeoning field of the history of children and childhood, whose goals are to listen to children's voices and recover their experiences, as well as to analyze how those voices and experiences have served as forces of historical change. Klapper succeeds terrifically at achieving a "balanced approach [that] explores and appreciates both similarity and difference in immigrant children's lives" (p. 179). Drawing on a wide range of memoirs and oral history interview collections, she manages to highlight the particular experiences of growing up among specific groups of immigrant children, while weaving these together into a shared story in which immigrant children from diverse backgrounds are connected by such common themes as discrimination, education, and gender. Klapper astutely notes that some of the patterns in the growing up experiences that she discovers reverberated beyond the immigrant, ethnic, and working-class communities that are her main focus. Children from across the social spectrum in the turn-of-the-century United States increasingly found their lives influenced by the state, largely through the expansion of public schooling, and by the rise of mass consumer culture. Regardless of their ethnic or class backgrounds, many children were compelled to navigate between the influences of tradition and modernity, and they sometimes clashed with their parents as they did so, a likelihood that increased as they grew older. Indeed, the struggles young immigrants faced in transitioning from one world to another, coping with conflicts over identity, and disputing with an older generation over assertions of youthful independence were at least partly analogous to the challenges characterizing the stage of...

Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth‐Century Europe by Victoria de Grazia

Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe Victoria de Grazia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. One of most visible and contentious ingredients of globalization today is worldwide spread of American-style mass consumer culture. Enthusiasts of economy cite broadening consumer choice and access to world markets as essential to promoting democracy, but as Victoria de Grazia states in her exhaustively researched and complex book, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe, globalizing consumer habits have established only most tenuous foundation for a peaceful, egalitarian society (3). One of problems, de Grazia points out, is that while American origin of twentieth-century consumer culture has clearly played a role in US global hegemony, diverse mechanisms of spreading American-style consumer culture around world, enumerated in book as the sum of myriads of marketing strategies, second-order decisions of government, and mundane choices about getting and spending (4), have sometimes been difficult to connect to each other and did not always directly or obviously augment American power. However, de Grazia points out that power of this is no less pervasive because of its elusiveness. In Western Europe, she argues, vocal criticisms of incursions of American consumer culture obscure an underlying adherence to Market Empire values and methods. Thus, today, a squarely European company like Ikea is as ubiquitous a symbol of consumerism as Coca Cola. The origins of Market Empire, de Grazia contends, is not in capitalist international development efforts of last several decades. It is not even entirely in post-World War II efforts to secure markets and curtail spread of Communism though such policies as Marshall Plan. Instead, de Grazia turns bulk of her attention (three-fourths of book) to period between World Wars, and to piecemeal, halting inroads Market Empire took in Western Europe toward replacing bourgeois, class stratified, imperialist practices of buying and selling with what de Grazia identifies as American ideals of consumer choice, democracy of goods, and a standard of living determined not by class or political ideology, but by technological innovation and consumer desires. This pre-1945 section of book is an impressive feat of international and multilingual research consisting of a series of case studies based upon archival materials in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France, and United States. In each case, triumph of Market Empire is partial at best. The first chapter, for example, is an illuminating account of spread of Rotary clubs in Western Europe after World War I. American Rotarians hoped that mission of clubs (providing a collegial, noncompetitive, and nonpolitical venue for urban businessmen and professionals to socialize, and plan service projects) would prove a blueprint for promoting peace in Europe. …

The evolution of the empowered consumer

PurposeAn oral history to examine the evolution of the empowered consumer and brand consciousness from 1918 to 1965 as a critical analysis of mass consumer culture in Britain.Design/methodology/approachThe authors trace the changing experience of consumer empowerment and importantly show oral testimony (oral history) as a method able to reveal the complexities of this experience.FindingsWomen locate increased choice and responsibility within changing marketing and retailing systems (including self‐service, branding and the media). The authors show how increased choice and responsibility was often experienced (at least initially) as challenging or confusing.Originality/valueThe study identifies that empowerment is a complex or paradoxical process. It provides empirical support for a growing number of claims that have challenged the linear benefit assumptions given to increased choice arising from classic economic theory and outline a model of the paradox of the evolution of the empowered consumer.