Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream. A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 377 pp., $17.95, ISBN 0-691-05827-X. Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda, eds., Consumers against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840–1990 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 377 pp., $29.95, ISBN 0-8476-8649-3. Jennifer A. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption and Modernity in Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 250 pp., $68.00, ISBN 1-85973-284-4. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 213 pp., $19.50, ISBN 1-85973-239-9. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern and Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending. European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Washington: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 477 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0-521-62694-3.The last twenty years have seen a proliferation of studies tracing the development of
the principal institutions of ‘mass consumption’ in Westernised societies during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Studies of leading department stores and the
marketing policies of major firms, publicity and sales methods, have sought to
increase understanding of the actors or ‘professions’ instrumental in the transformation
of such practices, their methods and scope, the reasons for their success and by
extension the reasons for the failure of alternative practices, ‘small’ shopkeepers and
‘small’ industrialists who felt threatened by the wave of change.
The confident, the ascetic, and the vigilant consumer: discourses of mass consumption and subjectivity in post-war Canada and the United States