Preface

Contributors

Introduction

Susan Strasser

Charles McGovern

Matthias Judt

PART ONE POLITICS, MARKETS, AND THE STATE

1 The Consumers' White Label Campaign of the National Consumers' League, 1898-1918

Kathryn Kish Sklar

2 Consumption and Citizenship in the United States, 1900-1940

Charles McGovern

3 Changing Consumption Regimes in Europe, 1930-1970: Comparative Perspectives on the Distribution Problem

Victoria de Grazia

4 Customer Research as Public Relations: General Motors in the 1930s

Roland Marchand

5 The New Deal State and the Making of Citizen Consumers

Lizabeth Cohen

6 Consumer Spending as State Project: Yesterday's Solutions and Today's Problems

George Lipsitz

7 The Emigre as Celebrant of American Consumer Culture: George Katona and Ernest Dichter

Daniel Horowitz

8 Dissolution of the "Dictatorship over Needs"? Consumer Behavior and Economic Reform in East Germany in the 1960s

Andre Steiner

PART TWO EVERYDAY LIFE

9 World War I and the Creation of Desire for Automobiles in Germany

Kurt Moser

10 Gender, Generation, and Consumption in the United States: Working-Class Families in the Interwar Period

Susan Porter Benson

11 Comparing Apples and Oranges: Housewives and the Politics of Consumption in Interwar Germany

Nancy Reagin

12 "The Convenience Is Out of This World": The Garbage Disposer and American Consumer Culture

Susan Strasser

13 Consumer Culture in the GDR, or How the Struggle for Antimodernity Was Lost on the Battleground of Consumer Culture

Ina Merkel

14 Changes in Consumption as Social Practice in West Germany During the 1950s

Michael Wildt

15 Reshaping Shopping Environments: The Competition Between the City of Boston and Its Suburbs

Matthias Judt

16 Toys, Socialization, and the Commodification of Play

Stephen Kline

17 The "Syndrome of the 1950s" in Switzerland: Cheap Energy, Mass Consumption, and the Environment

Christian Pfister

18 Reflecting on Ethnic Imagery in the Landscape of Commerce, 1945-1975

Fath Davis Ruffins

PART THREE HISTORY AND THEORY

19 Modern Subjectivity and Consumer Culture

James Livingston

20 Consumption and Consumer Society: A Contribution to the History of Ideas

Ulrich Wyrwa

21 Reconsidering Abundance: A Plea for Ambiguity

Jackson Lears

Index