Advertising Progress

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleOriginally published in 1998. Drawing on both documentary and pictorial evidence, Pamela Walker Laird explores the modernization of American advertising to 1920. She links its rise and transformation to changes that affected American society and business alike, including the rise of professional specialization and the communications revolution that new technologies made possible. Laird finds a fundamental shift in the kinds of people who created advertisements and their relationships to the firms that advertised. Advertising evolved from the work of informing customers (telling people what manufacturers had to sell) to creating consumers (persuading people that they needed to buy). Through this story, Laird shows how and why—in the intense competitions for both markets and cultural authority—the creators of advertisements laid claim to "progress" and used it to legitimate their places in American business and culture

Only a Girl : Christine Frederick, Efficiency, Consumerism, and Women\u27s Sphere.

Christine Frederick was a home efficiency expert who worked out of her home experiment station, Applecroft, in Greenlawn, New York, from 1910 to 1939. She advocated the application of scientific management, technology, and consumer awareness to homemaking. Frederick came of age during a time when feminism was opening a window of opportunity for middle-class, educated, white women. By the time she graduated from Northwestern University, the nineteenth-century doctrine of separate spheres was being challenged. Charlotte Perkins Gilman\u27s critique of the single-family home had been published, the woman suffrage campaign would gain new momentum within the next few years, and women were entering professions heretofore closed to them. Although she took full advantage of these developments, Frederick recognized that most middle-class Americans still held traditional beliefs about gender roles. Fashioning a career upon the premise that woman\u27s place was in the home, she was able to fulfill her need to succeed in the public sphere. She capitalized on trends such as technology, advertising and consumerism while accommodating the still-prevailing view that the preservation of the home depended upon woman\u27s remaining within it. Thus Frederick\u27s career paradoxically helped to contract feminism\u27s window. During the 1920s, when the first wave of feminism was receding in the face of conservative pressures, Frederick emphasized the importance of the housewife\u27s role in the marketplace, and advised advertisers and manufacturers on how to sell to Mrs. Consumer. . This dissertation examines Christine Frederick\u27s life and work in light of two twentieth-century developments. Her career as an expert on the home coincided with the rise and fall of the first wave of feminism. Although she benefited from the advances women enjoyed as a result of that movement, her work counteracted its rise and served its fall. Secondly, Frederick participated in the rise of modern technology and business through her work in the efficiency movement, the development of modern advertising, and the promotion of consumerism. Her gender created a conflict that motivated her to employ modernization to encourage women to remain in their traditional roles

The Good Consumer: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in the United States, 1840-1940

The modern consumer credit bureau is a powerful institution that has received much attention with regard to database surveillance and identity theft, but little scholarly inquiry into its origins and cultural significance. This study offers an historical account of consumer credit reporting in the United States, from its nineteenth-century antecedents in commercial credit reporting through its professionalization and transformation into a key communication infrastructure during the first half of the twentieth century. Like the nineteenth-century nation-state, which pioneered its own rationalized systems of textual identification in the form of passports and criminal registries, early credit reporting organizations sought to impose protocols of legibility in the marketplace. This study describes the development and information processip.g techniques of these private firms and merchant associations, the work of retail cre.dit managers in extracting and classifying customer information, and the role of the Retail Credit Men\u27s National Association (formed in 1912) in laying the foundation for a national consumer credit reporting apparatus. In addition, this study also draws special attention to one of the most consequential effects of credit reporting: the invention of financial identity. Formalized systems of credit assessment translated personal knowledge and local opinion (traditional sources of credit information) into disembodied textual representations of individual responsibility-first in narrative reports and later alphanumeric ratings. Within this totalizing system of disciplinary surveillance, the concept of financial identity circulated as a surrogate self, producing its own category of social reality and fostering new forms of economic objectification. Moreover, the centrality of character-one\u27s reputation for honesty and respectability-in the determination of creditworthiness reveals the moral underpinnings of financial identity and indeed all systems of credit assessment despite their claims to objectivity and technical neutrality. Financial identity, it is argued, is a form of moral identity. The title of this study refers to the goodness of credit consumers in several contexts: as prompt paying customers, as trustworthy and morally upright citizens, and as profitable target markets, and collectively as a vital force behind the growth of the twentieth-century American economy and an ideological vindication of consumer credit itself

George Nakashima\u27s Arts Building and Cloister: A Program for Conservation

This is the first thesis generated under the Memorandum of Understanding between the University of Pennsylvania and the Nakashima Foundation for Peace and George Nakashima Woodworker, S.A. entered into on the 1st of July 2014, which allow to study and document the Nakashima complex located at 1847 Aquetong Road, New Hope, Pennsylvania. The Nakashima complex comprises twenty-one buildings including family residences with furniture making facilities and storage spaces. Particularly, this thesis contributes to provide an informed understanding of the George Nakashima\u27s Arts Building and Cloister (1964-1967) through an examination of its contextual history, design and construction, changes over time, and a comprehensive building conditions assessment. As a conclusion, this thesis presents a series of recommendations for both the physical preservation and the long-term stewardship of the building

Imagining Consumers

Winner of the Hagley Prize in Business History from The Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History ConferenceSelected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleOriginally published in 1999. Imagining Consumers tells for the first time the story of American consumer society from the perspective of mass-market manufacturers and retailers. It relates the trials and tribulations of china and glassware producers in their contest for the hearts of the working- and middle-class women who made up more than eighty percent of those buying mass-manufactured goods by the 1920s. Based on extensive research in untapped corporate archives, Imagining Consumers supplies a fresh appraisal of the history of American business, culture, and consumerism. Case studies illuminate decision making in key firms—including the Homer Laughlin China Company, the Kohler Company, and Corning Glass Works—and consider the design and development of ubiquitous lines such as Fiesta tableware and Pyrex Ovenware