Amazon.com description: Product Description: This colllection of essays, winner of the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize as the best folklore book of 1990, should be of interest to anyone with an interest in how the humble devices and relics of everyday American life influenced, and continue to influence, American cultural history. The essays are divided into three sections - "everyday life", "public landscape" and "museums as artifacts" - and range across such diverse subjects as the birth of mail-order merchandising, the Victorian cult of childhood, the influence of the New England presence on the American Midwest and the 19th-century chautauqua phenomenon.