Lorenzkowski, Barbara

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Histoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXIX, no 77 (mai-May 2006)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 283“increasingly convinced that the tourism effort was an industry itself ... and moreconscious of the need to produce a tourism product that would not disappoint people”(p. 156). The means through which this was achieved was the commodification ofhistory for both international and domestic consumption. If current advertising is anyindication, this situation predominates in the industry today.As fine as Dawson’s analysis is, the reader is left with a number of questions unan-swered. While Dawson clearly states in his introduction that his study is not intended“to provide a comprehensive history of tourism in British Columbia” (p. 12), and herecognizes the limitation on his sources, it would have been interesting to see what,if anything, oral history could bring to the discussion (either that of tourists or someformer tourism promoters). There is also a question of the role of film in Dawson’sthesis. While he does briefly discuss the British Columbia Tourist Bureau films of1942 and 1964 and how they demonstrate the growing commodification of Nativeculture, these could have been explored in greater depth and the discussion expandedto include earlier attempts by provincial and federal motion picture bureaus.These minor criticisms aside, Selling British Columbia will no doubt spur a pleth-ora of further studies on the development of tourism in Canada and the relationshipbetween mass consumerism and the commoditization of leisure.Michel S. BeaulieuQueen’s UniversityELVINS, Sarah — Sales & Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in WesternNew York State, 1920–1940. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Pp. 222.This imaginatively conceived work sets out to explore a question that may appear“deceptively simple”, as the author playfully acknowledges. The answer is anythingbut. “How national was the national market of the 1920s and 1930s?” Sarah Elvinsasks in her important study of mass consumption and consumerism in early-twenti-eth-century America that invites us to rethink the power of the local in mediating thepressures and allures of mass culture (p. xiii). Turning her critical lenses to twomedium-sized cities in western New York State — Buffalo and Rochester — Elvinsuncovers the story of independent merchants and department store owners who didnot simply succumb to the homogenizing force of a national market, but ratherembraced it selectively and on their own terms. Adopting “a language of localism”,retailers in Buffalo and Rochester insisted that they alone could understand localneeds and desires. While Elvins acknowledges the mercenary quality of such asser-tions that fashioned local identity into yet another “powerful selling tool”, she dem-onstrates — in a richly textured narrative — how and why place continued to matter,for retailers and consumers alike. The department stores that dotted the central busi-ness districts of Rochester and Buffalo, she argues, shaped their cities’ cultural andphysical landscapes “in ways that their New York and Chicago counterparts did not”(p. xv) and acted as local boosters, cultural brokers, and sites of entertainment andeducation.284 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXIX, no 77 (mai-May 2006)In vivid prose, the author evokes the glamour of early department stores in Buffaloand Rochester whose innovative lighting and communication systems made themmodels of modernity, while marketing strategies remained finely attuned to the needsof the local community. Local icons such as Mr. Brigham of the toy department atBarnum’s sold rocking horses to generations of Buffalo boys, while Cy — the fameddelivery horse of Sibley’s in Rochester — trotted the city’s streets until 1938. Tomake the experience of shopping both personal and memorable, local departmentstores featured restaurants and tearooms, housed public library branches on their pre-mises, arranged social appointments for out-of-town visitors eager to reconnect withlocal friends and relatives, and offered full delivery service three times a day.In championing a new ideology of consumption, department stores in Rochesterand Buffalo shared in a nation-wide trend. Yet, as Elvins suggests, unlike their big-city counterparts, merchants in western New York State framed their contributions totheir local communities in a specifically local way. Eschewing the grand rhetoric ofprogressive business practices, they committed themselves to local causes. A “Sol-diers’ Picture Window” at Sibley’s in Rochester paid tribute to the young menfighting abroad in 1917 and 1918, while retailers in Buffalo coordinated the com-memoration of Armistice Day. Stores sponsored local charity events and took the leadin promoting local industries, as Sibley’s did in 1927 with its theme week “WhatRochester Makes — Makes Rochester” that became an annual tradition.In probing the commercial spaces of the early-twentieth-century urban landscape,the author travels territory previously charted by William Leach, Susan Porter Ben-son, Kathy Peiss, and Lizabeth Cohen (although her study adds many a charmingexample to earlier works that instructors in American history will hasten to add totheir lecture notes). It is in her close reading of national trade journals, her nuancedexamination of the arrival of chain stores at the local scene, and her analysis of the“language of localism” in the era of the Great Depression that Elvins makes her mostoriginal contributions.Trade papers such as the Dry Goods Journal, the Merchandise Manager, and theDepartment Store Buyer, Elvins asserts, “aimed for a truly national perspective on theretailing industry” and “featured sales ideas from every part of the nation” (pp. 48–49). Although smaller stores were advised to adopt modern management techniquesand systematize their merchandising strategies, they were also counselled to remaintrue to their own “personality”. The dynamic tensions between hub and hinterlandcame to the fore in a piece of satire that evoked the golden days, just out of reach, ofa close, personal relationship between Buffalo stores and customers that no modernretailing methods could possibly match. But if there existed an undercurrent of resis-tance to the trend to rationalization, retailers in Buffalo and Rochester also tookadvantage of modern channels of communication, such as the flourishing women’smagazines that brought the latest styles and fashions to medium-sized cities.Rather than fostering a dependence on the nation’s centres of fashion, the authorargues, these magazines allowed local department stores to bypass New York and gostraight “to the source of fashion”. In Paris, specially employed buyers boughtclothes and fashionable goods and shipped them directly to the clothes racks of Buf-falo’s and Rochester’s department stores. The relationship between the local and theHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXIX, no 77 (mai-May 2006)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 285national thus worked both ways, Elvins suggests. While local fashions came to bemodelled after national trends, local department stores carved out their own spaces ofmodernity, “taking the best of what the mass market had to offer but presenting them-selves as the old-fashioned remnants of a bygone retail era” (p. 76).So deeply engrained was the “language of localism” in Buffalo and Rochester thatchain stores, too, adopted it as a successful marketing device. The Loblaws grocerychain, which expanded to Buffalo in 1925, took pains to point out that it was “con-tributing to the success of Buffalo as a city” and employed “Buffalo workmen, in theerection of stores”. Local stores, in turn, portrayed the unwelcome competitors as“foreign interlopers” whose loyalty was owed to “far-off bureaucracies” (pp. 97,105). In the era of Depression, then, the rhetoric of local sentiment and communityservice was used to bolster local consumption. A “Pledge for Prosperity” in Roches-ter and a city-wide “Buffalo Day” portrayed consumption as a civic duty and urgedlocal citizens to spend their way out of the Depression.Tightly argued, this study seamlessly integrates findings from Buffalo and Roch-ester sources into a persuasive narrative. If the author occasionally seems to overstateher case, as in her discussion of the advantageous alliance between national brandsand local department stores in chapter 4, this is a minor quibble, as is the observationthat the fine photographs and illustrations could have been usefully integratedthroughout the book. In timely fashion, Sarah Elvins has reminded us that “the localcontinued (and continues) to matter” (p. 172), be it the age of nationalism or the glo-bal pressures of our own times.Barbara LorenzkowskiConcordia UniversityEPP, Marlene, Franca IACOVETTA, and Frances SWYRIPA, eds. — Sisters or Strang-ers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History. Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp. 418.This is a highly informative collection of essays. Conceived as a response to and con-tinuation of sociologist Jean Burnet’s pioneering volume on ethnic women’s historythat appeared in 1986 (Looking into My Sister’s Eyes: An Exploration in Women’sHistory), this new book seeks to go beyond the female immigrant experience inCanadian history and ask new questions. As the title suggests, the main questionaddressed is the degree to which marginalized immigrant women may be portrayedas sisters to their white Canadian female hosts in Canada’s past. Inspired by feministscholarship and critical race studies, the book includes essays on Japanese, Chinese,Black African, Aboriginal, British, Irish, Finnish, Ukrainian, Italian, Jewish, Menno-nite, Armenian, and South Asian Hindu women. This diversity of subjects and thelong period covered by the articles are among the book’s strengths, yet, as is often thecase in such collaborative efforts — a total of 19 female scholars contribute to the 17essays — the articles are of varying quality.The book is loosely organized into six parts, which, taken together, span a period

Elvins, Sarah — Sales & Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940

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Elvins, Sarah — Sales & Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)