“The gift that starts a home”: marketing of the hope chest in the USA

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-502
Author(s):  
Leighann Neilson ◽  
Erin Barkel
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Sales Promotion ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of

Purpose This paper aims to present a history of the marketing of hope chests in the USA, focusing in particular on one very successful sales promotion, the Lane Company’s Girl Graduate Plan. The Girl Graduate Plan is placed within its historical context to better understand the socioeconomic forces that contributed to its success for a considerable period but ultimately led to decreased demand for the product. Design/methodology/approach The history of the marketing of hope or marriage chests draws upon primary sources located in the Lane Company Collection at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Secondary sources and images of advertising culled from Google image searches provided additional insight into the operation of the company’s Girl Graduate Plan. Findings While the Lane Company benefitted in the form of increased sales, profit and brand awareness and loyalty from prevailing socio-economic trends, which supported the success of its Girl Graduate Plan, including targeting the youth market, this promotion ultimately fell victim to the company’s failure to stay abreast of social changes related to the role of women in society. Research limitations/implications Like all historical research, this research is dependent upon the historical sources that are accessible. The authors combined documents available from the Virginia Historical Society archives with online searches, but other data sources may well exist. Practical implications This history investigates how one manufacturer, a leader in the North American industry, collaborated with furniture dealers to promote their products to young women who were about to become the primary decision makers for the purchase of home furnishings. As such, it provides an historical example of the power of successful collaboration with channel partners. It also provides an example of innovation within an already crowded market. Social implications The hope chest as an object of material culture can be found in many cultures worldwide. It has variously represented a woman’s coming of age, the love relationship between a couple and a family’s social status. It has also served as a woman’s store of wealth. This history details how changing social values influenced the popularity of the hope chest tradition in the USA. Originality/value The history of the marketing of hope chests is an area that has not been seriously considered in consumption histories or in histories of marketing practices to date, in spite of the continuing sentimental appeal for many consumers.

Words or Things in American History?

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-34
Author(s):  
Steven Conn
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter uses John Kouwenhoven’s 1963 essay “American Studies: Words or Things” as a touchstone to examine the history of the relationship between material culture and the study of the past. Material culture studies promised access both to the history of those who left no written records and to a different kind of cognitive insight than could be gained from traditional historical sources. While this was of a piece with the development of the “new social history” in the 1960s, the chapter looks back to the early twentieth century to put Kouwenhoven’s call for the study of material culture in a longer historical context, and it traces what happened to material culture studies over the last half-century. The chapter suggests that despite its many accomplishments, the use of material culture remains on the edges of most historical work, especially after historians took the linguistic turn, which refocused their attention on texts rather than things.

‘The Campaign of the Elephant’ in the Context of the History of Arabia in the Sixth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-283
Author(s):  
D. Ye. Mishin
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scholarly Discussion

The goal of this article is to present an analysis of extant information on the ‘Campaign of the Elephant’ against Mecca with due regard to the overall historical context. The date of that event still remains as an object of a scholarly discussion, making this study opportune. The position of the scholars who reject the traditional dating of the campaign (around 570–571) and put it back to earlier times does not appear to be well-founded. Historical sources show that Emperor Justin II of Byzantium (565–574), who needed allies for his struggle against the Sasanians in the late 560’s and the early 570’s, called on the Ethiopian Negus and the latter’s half-independent governor of Yemen. The governor, probably, made a campaign to the North around the 570–571, and that appears to be remembered by the Arabs as ‘The Campaign of the Elephant’. Sasanid king Khusraw I Anushirwan (531–579) in 572 attacked and conquered Yemen. That came as a counter measure to the Ethiopian advance to the North, because the Sasanid king considered that activity to be a threat to his empire.

Historical and conceptual perspectives on urban regeneration: a prolog to a special issue

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Balsas
Keyword(s):  
Urban Regeneration ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Management And Development ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Uk

Purpose This paper aims to review multiple historical perspectives on urban regeneration interventions while also serving as a prologue to and the rationale for a special issue of the Journal of Place Management and Development (JPMD) on Placemaking and Sustainable Urban Regeneration in Japan. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews the literature on city center regeneration, with particular attention to the USA and the UK contexts. The emphasis is on comparing and contrasting what have become known as the North American and European regeneration models. This background is helpful to place the Special Issue in a broad international context. Findings The key finding is that the history of planning city centers appears to be largely a response to urbanization and the problems it has brought forward. The papers in this JPMD’s special issue exemplify this finding with cases from Toyama, Kanazawa and Tokyo. Originality Cities are transformed as their centers grow and develop. City centers represent important anchor points in every community. However, evolving functional decentralization has occurred mostly due to changes in flows of capital, people, materials and other socio-economic transformations. The review shows how urban regeneration programs tend to be implemented to correct and or improve physical, socio-economic and environmental problems associated with functional and programmatic decentralization.

scholarly journals Architectural ruins: geoculture of the anatomy of buildings as illustrated by Casa Ippolito, Malta

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lino Bianco
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Building Materials ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
History Of ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
Building Physics

AbstractRuins are a statement on the building materials used and the construction method employed. Casa Ippolito, now in ruins, is typical of 17th-century Maltese aristocratic country residences. It represents an illustration of secondary or anthropogenic geodiversity. This paper scrutinises these ruins as a primary source in reconstructing the building’s architecture. The methodology involved on-site geographical surveying, including visual inspection and non-invasive tests, a geological survey of the local lithostratigraphy, and examination of notarial deeds and secondary sources to support findings about the building’s history as read from its ruins. An unmanned aerial vehicle was used to digitally record the parlous state of the architectural structure and karsten tubes were used to quantify the surface porosity of the limestone. The results are expressed from four perspectives. The anatomy of Casa Ippolito, as revealed in its ruins, provides a cross-section of its building history and shows two distinct phases in its construction. The tissue of Casa Ippolito—the building elements and materials—speaks of the knowledge of raw materials and their properties among the builders who worked on both phases. The architectural history of Casa Ippolito reveals how it supported its inhabitants’ wellbeing in terms of shelter, water and food. Finally, the ruins in their present state bring to the fore the site’s potential for cultural tourism. This case study aims to show that such ruins are not just geocultural remains of historical built fabric. They are open wounds in the built structure; they underpin the anatomy of the building and support insights into its former dynamics. Ruins offer an essay in material culture and building physics. Architectural ruins of masonry structures are anthropogenic discourse rendered in stone which facilitate not only the reconstruction of spaces but also places for human users; they are a statement on the wellbeing of humanity throughout history.

Cold War consumption and the marketing of childhood in the Soviet Union and the United States, 1950-1960

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
The Cold War

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the relationship between childhood, consumption and the Cold War in 1950s America and the Soviet Union. The author argues that Soviet and American leaders, businessmen, and politicians worked hard to convince parents that buying things for their children offered the easiest way to raise good American and Soviet kids and to do their part in waging the economic battles of the Cold War. The author explores how consumption became a Cold War battleground in the late 1950s and suggests that the history of childhood and Cold War consumption alters the way we understand the conflict itself. Design/Methodology/Approach – Archival research in the USA and the Russian Federation along with close readings of Soviet and American advertisements offer sources for understanding the global discourse of consumption in the 1950s and 1960s. Findings – Leaders, advertisers, and propagandists in the Soviet Union and the USA used the same images in the same ways to sell the ethos of consumption to their populations. They did this to sell the Cold War, to bolster the status quo, and to make profits. Originality/Value – This paper offers a previously unexplored, transnational perspective on the role that consumption and the image of the child played in shaping the Cold War both domestically and abroad.

Toward a history of housing market analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 632-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Baer
Keyword(s):  
Housing Market ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Market Analysis ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Urban Market ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of

Purpose This paper aims to relate early history of housing conceptualizations and market analysis in the Anglosphere (Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). Historians are ignorant of them but clear market analyses had early beginnings in every urban society for developing and accommodating growing populations. Design/methodology/approach Historiography. Findings Aspects of market analysis, especially appraisal and rudimentary approaches to the housing market in the Anglosphere, can be traced back to ancient Rome, housing market conceptualizations to Dr Nicholas Barbon and seventeenth-century London’s first population and housing boom and market analysis techniques in the USA at its founding, when Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand Perigor was the first to refine them and write them up in 1794-1796. The US next made major advances in the 1930s. The overall trend has been from inferred analyses to fundamental (derived) analyses, emphasizing “quantifiable data.” Practical implications This paper elicits researcher’s professional awareness that each nation has an implicit history of its early development practices and techniques. Originality/value The time frame of most housing market analysts is the recent past, the present and the future. But how enduring are their concerns? Do operational values in a housing market reflect historical epochs, or are there some universalities? Furthermore, most urban historians are ignorant of urban market dynamics. It does not occur to them that some of the dynamics that analysts attempt to capture today might always have been inherent in the urban built environment, regardless of era or urbanized part of the globe under consideration.

The US battle against brand marketing: circa 1930-1980

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross D. Petty
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Consumer Movement ◽  
Brand Marketing ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Second World

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the debate about brand marketing that occurred as part of the 1930s consumer movement and continued after the Second World War in academic and regulatory circles. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents an historical account of the anti-brand marketing movement using a qualitative approach. It examines both primary and secondary historical sources as well as legal statutes, regulatory agency actions, judicial cases and newspaper and trade journal stories. Findings In response to the rise of brand marketing in the latter 1800s and early 1900s, the USA experienced an anti-brand marketing movement that lasted half a century. The first stage was public as part of the consumer movement but was overshadowed by the product safety and truth-in-advertising concerns. The consumer movement stalled when the USA entered the Second World War, but brand marketing continued to raise questions during the war as the US government attempted to regulate the provisions of goods during the war. After the war, the public accepted brand marketing. Continuing anti-brand marketing criticism was largely confined to academic writings and regulatory activities. Ultimately, many of the stage-two challenges to brand marketing went nowhere, but a few led to regulations that continue today. Originality/value This paper is the first to recognize a two-stage anti-brand marketing movement in the USA from 1929 to 1980 that has left a small but significant modern-day regulatory legacy.

scholarly journals Resituating Erving Goffman: From Stigma Power to Black Power

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 744-765 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imogen Tyler
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Interaction Order ◽  
The Relationship

This article offers a critical re-reading of the understanding of stigma forged by the North American sociologist Erving Goffman in his influential Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). One of the most widely read and cited sociologists in history, Goffman was already famous when Stigma was published in 1963. His previous books were best-sellers and Stigma alone has sold an astonishing 800,000 copies in the 50 years since its publication. Given its considerable influence, it is surprising how little sustained engagement there has been with the historicity of Goffman’s account. This article resituates Goffman’s conceptualisation of stigma within the historical context of Jim Crow and the Black freedom struggles that were shaking ‘the social interaction order’ to its foundations at the very moment he crafted his account. It is the contention of this article that these explosive political movements against the ‘humiliations of racial discrimination’ invite revision of Goffman’s decidedly apolitical account of stigma. This historical revision of Goffman’s stigma concept builds on an existing body of critical work on the relationship between race, segregation and the epistemology of sociology within the USA. Throughout, it reads Goffman’s Stigma through the lens of ‘Black Sociology’, a field of knowledge that here designates not only formal sociological scholarship, but political manifestos, journalism, creative writing, oral histories and memoirs. It is the argument of this article that placing Goffman’s concept of stigma into critical dialogue with Black epistemologies of stigma allows for a timely reconceptualisation of stigma as governmental technologies of dehumanisation that have long been collectively resisted from below.

Ancient Tajikistan Studies in History, Archaeology and Culture (1980-1991)

1995 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-304
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Ww Ii ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Written Sources

AbstractSystematic archaeological research began immediately after WW II with work on Iran Age monuments at Kala-i-mir, Boldai-tepe and Baidudasht IV. Of recently studied Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic monuments, the most important is Takhti-Sangin (thought to be the source of the Oxus treasure). More than 5000 votive objects have now been recovered from the temple here (now completely excavated and dated to the first quarter of the 1st c. B.C.). Excavations at Ai-Khanoum prove that the strength and persistence of Hellenic culture seen at the Oxus temple was not unique in Bactria, while a complex now being studied at Dushanbe pushes the range of Greco-Bactrian culture far further to the north than was hitherto thought. Investigation of burial monuments at Tup-khana testifies to the acceptance of Bactrian material culture by incoming nomad groups, whereas study of a Buddhist complex of the 3rd-4th c. A.D. at Ushurmullo shows its continued use down to the 7th-8th c. Ancient written sources on the history of Central Asia have been studied by I.V. Pyankov, whilst E.V. Zeimal has produced a description, classification and analysis of the coin series of the region. Finally, T.P. Kiyatkina has written a series of works on palaeo-anthropological material from Tajikistan and Turkmenia.

Karl E. Weick and the dawning awareness of organized cognition

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (6) ◽  
pp. 1287-1299 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H Starbuck
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Behavior ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Major Activity ◽  
Sharp Focus ◽  
Thought Leader ◽  
History Of ◽  
Karl Weick ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Cognitive Perspectives

Purpose – Cognitive perspectives have emerged from many years of struggle for recognition, and grown into a dominant theme in psychology. The purpose of this paper is to discuss what Karl Weick expressed as important themes in this struggle, made major contributions to the content of cognitive psychology, and helped to make cognition relevant for organizational behavior. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reviews key developments in the history of psychology, points out central issues, and summarizes Weick’s contributions. Findings – Weick brought sensemaking into sharp focus as a major activity of people and organizations. His writings established information processing as the core of organizational activities. He also showed how sensemaking affects organizational reliability. Originality/value – Weick is one of the authors whom management scholars cite very often because he has been a thought leader. The paper places Weick’s work in historical context and points to his major contributions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document