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Fall/Winter 1957 Sears catalog page spread of men's work clothes.

Before Folding 30 Years Ago, the Sears Catalog Sold Some Surprising Products

The retail giant’s mail-order business reigned supreme for more than a century, offering everything from quack cures to ready-to-build homes.
by Leo DeLuca via Smithsonian on January 26, 2023
Tourists taking photos at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
partner

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Coca Cola Strategy: Selling King’s Dream to the World

Martin Luther King’s words are available publicly — for a price.
by Daniel T. Fleming via Made By History on January 16, 2023
Collage of yoga, palm tree, police tape

The Birth of a New Brand of Exercise Fetish

From Bikram yoga to Tae Bo, the 1990s exploded with exoticized consumer fitness products.
by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela via The Nation on December 13, 2022
Illustration of Harold drawing the moon, from "Harold and the Purple Crayon"

On "Harold of the Purple Crayon" and the Value of an Imaginative Journey

Considering the lessons and history of Crockett Johnson’s classic.
by Ross Ellenhorn via Literary Hub on November 8, 2022
Twentieth-century porcelain dolls made by German company Armand Marseille

How Porcelain Dolls Became the Ultimate Victorian Status Symbol

Class-obsessed consumers found the cold, hard and highly breakable figurines irresistible
by Maria Teresa Hart via Smithsonian on November 1, 2022
Debt written on a blackboard

How We All Got in Debt

Consumer debt shapes American lives so thoroughly that it seems eternal and immortal, but it’s actually relatively new to the financial world.
by Louis Hyman, Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily on June 2, 2022
"What difference would another world make?", Sam Pulitzer, 2021.

New Left Review

Who did neoliberalism?
by Erik Baker via n+1 on March 8, 2022
Pile of US paper currency.

Austerity Policies In The United States Caused ‘Stagflation’ In The 1970s

U.S. government policies must continue to support physical and social infrastructure spending amid the continuing pandemic to avoid ‘stagflation’.
by Andrew Yamakawa Elrod via Washington Center For Equitable Growth on January 11, 2022
Photograph of a dilapidated mall from the rear parking lot.

Mallstalgia

Once derided as cesspools of Reagan-era consumerist excess, the shopping mall somehow became an unlikely sort-of quasi-public space that is now disappearing.
by Jason Tebbe via Tropics of Meta on November 29, 2021
A blurry pixilated image of Jimmy Carter on a television screen.

How the Ghost of Jimmy Carter’s Presidency Haunts Everything Biden Says About Supply Shortages

The last from-the-top critique of American overconsumption generated a massive backlash.
by Kevin Mattson via Slate on October 22, 2021
John Cage on the quiz show "Lascia o Raddoppia?"

Freedom for Sale

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.
by Fintan O’Toole via New York Review of Books on July 1, 2021
Black and white photo of a family sitting around the television together

A Brief History of Consumer Culture

Over the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.
by Kerryn Higgs via The MIT Press Reader on January 11, 2021
Men and women workers marching in a 1914 May Day parade.

Time Is the Universal Measure of Freedom

In our own era of uncontrolled working hours, controlling our time is a vision of freedom worth capturing.
by Mike Konczal via Boston Review on January 8, 2021
Thorstein Veblen in 1880, the year he graduated from Carleton College

The Prophet of Maximum Productivity

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.
by Kwame Anthony Appiah via New York Review of Books on January 3, 2021
Toy santa mug shots

The War on Christmas

A brief history of the Yuletide in America.
by Charles Ludington via The American Scholar on December 28, 2020

From Home to Market: A History of White Women’s Power in the US

The heart-tug tactics of 1950s ads steered white American women away from activism into domesticity. They’re still there.
by Ellen Wayland Smith via Aeon on September 17, 2020

Racism on the Road

In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He was right.
by Sarah A. Seo via New York Review of Books on July 23, 2020
partner

To Be Effective, The Covid-19 Relief Bill Must Spark Consumer Spending

While assisting businesses, Congress must also continue to help consumers.
by Stephen Leccese via Made By History on March 26, 2020

Human Crap: The Idea of ‘Disposability’ Is a New and Noxious Fiction

We are demigods of discards – but our copious garbage became a toxic burden only with the modern cult of ‘disposability.’
by Gabrielle Hecht via Aeon on March 25, 2020
A lone person sits in an empty mall.
partner

Americans Must Relearn to Sacrifice in the Time of Coronavirus

Citizenship used to demand sacrifice. Then we taught Americans to buy things instead.
by Joseph Stieb via Made By History on March 19, 2020

A Slave Trader’s Office Decor and the Pornography of Capitalism

In the antebellum South, the slave trader’s office was a site of desire.
by Jeff Forret via The Panorama on February 17, 2020
Cartoon of people at a crossroad, with one direction pointing to "prosperity" and the other to "depression"

Selling Keynesianism

Today, we can learn a lot from the popularizing efforts that led to that consensus that Keynesianism leads to and long-lasting economic success.
by Robert Manduca via Boston Review on December 6, 2019

Fandom: A Star Wars Story

This is about much more than Star Wars—it is about media bias and "information disorder" in the twenty-first century.
by William Proctor via Contingent on December 4, 2019

The Boycott’s Abolitionist Roots

How a group of 19th-century Quakers cut their economic ties to slavery.
by Willy Blackmore via The Nation on August 14, 2019
McDonald's parking lot.

A Crispy, Salty, American History of Fast Food

Adam Chandler’s new book explores the intersection between fast food and U.S. history.
by Adam Chandler, Anna Diamond via Smithsonian on June 24, 2019
Ad for Betty Crocker in the Ladies' Home Journal, featuring a recipe for chiffon cake.

The Power of Corporate Interests Over Home Baking

Throughout the early 20th century, food corporations created advertisement campaigns directed at women.
by Maria Dawson via Nursing Clio on May 28, 2019

Baby, Christmas Songs Have Always Been Controversial

Long before “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” holiday songs played a part in the War on Christmas.
by Neil J. Young via The Atlantic on December 24, 2018

Did the Golden Age of Department Stores Bring Us Together?

What is now an object of nostalgia was once a symbol of soulless corporate creep.
by Stephen Eide via The American Conservative on December 21, 2018

Reconsidering the Jewish American Princess

How the JAP became America’s most complex Jewish stereotype.
by Jamie Lauren Keiles via Vox on December 5, 2018

Here Is a Human Being

The Spotify and Ancestry partnership proposes to entertain users based on the narrowest possible conception of who they are.
by Cam Scott via Popula on September 27, 2018
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