William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). ISBN-10: $12.84. Preliminary draft of full proposal due. Gender and Politics in the 20th Century Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in. Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992). For America, see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993). For a 817 This content downloaded from 159.149.210.42 on Tue, 25 Nov 2014 10:29:24 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions. 114 Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture by William R. Leach Reviews-Bio-Summary-All Formats-Sale Prices for Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. In Country of Exiles, William Leach, whose Land of Desire was a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the troubling effects of our national love affair with mobility. He shows us how the impulse to pull up stakes and find a new frontier has always battled with the need to put down roots, and how a new cosmopolitanism has seized our.
Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture William Leach Random House; 1993 428 Pages The transformations that America went through in order to become a capitalist country were very significant and are sometimes looked past. However, in the book Land of Desire, the author, William Leach extensively goes into many of those things. There were many things that went into this ranging from specific poeple and incidents to outside places and things.
Leach shows each individual ordeal and explains the personal effect that it had on the industry, as well as how society accepted, or in some cases condemned such things. All of this comes from his own education and understanding of the situation. He shows the drift into a capitalistic country as being a gradual change in one thing that then led to another, and to another, and so on. Not to mention that many, many things took part in it. And that if such things had not occurred, we would not be the country that we are today. There isn’t a whole lot of information on William Leach, but he does appear to be a very well-thought out man.
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This is not his only historical book and he’s also done other things, including the book True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society, and editing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. That specifically shows up a number of times in Land of Desire. He refers to L. Frank Baum (the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) throughout the book, as well as to the book itself. Other than that, though, there’s not much else I know about him, too bad it’s not exactly the most helpful information as far as why he thinks the way he does. Leach broke the book up into 5 major parts.
The first being the preface and the introduction. These two parts laid out the main ideas of the book. After that, Leach went into the three main sections of the book, which end up being the three main steps in the transformation into capitalism. The first entitled Strategies of Enticement, went into a little bit of history, as well as the first recognition of capitalism and were it all began. The second section, Circuits of Power, retold stories of how the public reacted to the whole thing. It also dealt with the philosophical side of capitalism.
The final major section of the book, Managing a Dream Culture, displayed the managerial aspects of capitalism and the poeple behind it. Then, the last pages illustrate how the history in the book affected our country today, hence the its Legacies. It pretty much sums up why what happened was important and the such. “This book exhibits how this older culture was challenged and was gradually superseded by the new culture,” (p8). That pretty much sums up the first section of the book, Strategies of Enticement. Within this chapter you see the clear path towards capitalism being chosen.
It starts out with what led up to the idea of capitalism, including the merchant John Wanamaker and the retail wars. It sets up the most vital history to understanding the whole transmission into capitalism. The next step to the up and rising consumer industry was the elaborate and aesthetically pleasing forms of advertisement that began. It all began with the advertising cards and eventually led to billboards and electrical advertising. This is also one of the first times that Baum is discussed, this time concerning his manual on “the arts of decorating and display” (p56).
This was really the chapter of advertisement’s roots. One of the last chapters of this section is about fashion and the effect it had on the market. It also links the wants of the US consumers to the haves of the European consumers, specifically France. The first of many fashion shows begin arising here and the impact that foreign countries have on what is “in” and “out” begin here. Later on, Oriental fashion shows up in a similar way. The final chapter in this section goes into the detail of the first customer services.
It begins the linkage between capitalism and religion here due to the fact that many of the ideals in customer services were similar to those ideals of Christians. Despite the fact that “Americans had broken from their older religious heritage, at their best they still retained the spirit of service” (p115). And from there the hospitality in public places such as daycares, live music, etc all began. It also touched on refunds and what we would now call credit cards. The next few chapters wrapped into the section entitled Circuits of Power, broadened on the effects of the growing consumer awareness and capitalism.
It discusses just how much of an impact capitalism and it’s creations had on every day life for the poeple. Museums, restaurants, hotels, and even educational systems among other things all changed their ways due to the new ideas brought about by capitalism. Commercial art schools sprung up in a number of places and the book even went into the fact that many “furniture designers, and designers of wrapping papers, combs, labels, and packaging visited the Brooklyn museum” (p170) as a way to expand their minds and products.
The new places had an impact on things like the transportation even, “special subway stations were erected for the big department stores and hotels” (p173). Things were changing in a big way. This is also the section where religion is expanded upon, as well as the philosophy of mind curing. The big debate concerning religion here is whether capitalism and the consumer industry can grow and still stay moral. This is something that seems t be argued about any change and the answer seemed to be more so than anything, no.
Wanamaker came up and was a prime model in that area. He did many moral things for the community like set up youth groups and the such, but when it came to business, his goals changed to personal gratification. Although a few poeple still thought it possible, more thought that the “split perspective reflected a division in public and personal goals and undercut the ability of religion to deal with the crucial public issues of the day” (p195). And so it usually went. Mind curing started up soon after the rise of consumerism through literature, mainly.
It consisted of “common roots with both liberal and evangelical Protestantism and carried to an extreme many of the most liberal tendencies of in those faiths” (p 226). Such authors as L. Frank Baum and Eleanor Porter supported and helped to spread the philosophy throughout the country and it held onto a number of poeple for quite a while. The last section of the book, Managing a Dream Culture, was a lot about the accomplishment of stabilizing capitalism in the US. This is where the nitty gritty of it all came out.
The first chapter of it, was completely about how the booming businesses were handled and who handled them. The loans and credit businesses were also hot and so were problems with them. People were cheaply taking advantage of things like return policies (much like they do even now), doing things like returning whole sets of furniture after using them solely for a single wedding (p301). Another thing that came up again was the aesthetics of the marketing and of the stores themselves. Elegance was very popular and accessories were big, especially around Christmas time.
Christmas time in the big New York department stores was (and is still) a really big deal, it’s actually one of the real reasons that there are toy departments at all. One of these chapters also went through how the whole Santa at the mall thing came about, in the early 1900s. It was all about marketing and making money, and due to it the popularity of Christmas and Santa sky rocketed. There wasn’t any way of getting away from the holidays and there still isn’t. The final chapter, tells a how lot about Herbert Hoover and what he did to guide the last parts of the transition. Herbert Hoover was a major architect of change” (p352) and Leach found him as a good man when it came to pushing for the consumption system. He did a number of things including strengthening the institutional structure and helping enable the environment for economical development. This was another small part about who and what handled the new system of capitalism in our country. And then finally there is the section, Legacies, it pretty much tells you how Leach thinks individual things that went on permanently changed society for us today.
And that the stuff that went on from 1880-1930 really made a permanent difference, for the most part improvements, to our business and marketing systems of today. America strives on this market and without it, we would lose a big piece of our American heritage. Besides, “however flawed, the capitalist concept of self, the consumer concept of the self, it is a reigning American concept” (p386) and it is in this system that there is the freedom of self expression and self fulfillment in a market with no boundaries. This is a really well set up book, I think.
The way Leach organized everything in the different sections and then in chapters makes it very easy to follow the history of capitalism. Although, sometimes it seems as though he went a little far in explaining certain ideals, as well as exaggerating the importance of some things. Overall though, it was very well done and after the Prologue, it is a really interesting book. Some of the conclusions that were drawn throughout the book were obviously biased. Although most of the book is very informative without a strong bias, at certain points you could very well see if or if not Leach agreed with a certain quote or idea.
You could also tell where his interests laid, specifically when he spoke about literature. You heard a lot about Baum and poeple that were connected with him, but other than that, no other authors were discussed other than Porter, who had many similar ideals to Baum’s. Another thing that was discussed a lot was religion, so I think that Leach has a strong connection to religion, too. He always wanted to make it a part of the topic being discussed, whether it was relevant or not, it sometimes seemed. Other than those two things and Leach wrote quite impartially and stuck to the facts very well.
As far as contradicting or supporting information I had already attained on this topic, I would have to say that if anything, he agrees with it and added some. He expanded on many topics a lot more heavily than we ever discussed or read about in class. It did parallel some of the things that we learned such as how capitalism came up and why it was so popular with the public. I think it gives some very good information on those things, as well as how the new system affected the growing country. It gives the perspectives of not only Leach but of other historians through quotes and ideals in general.
Leach used a number of sources to create the point of view that he has, and he shared those things so as to help us form an opinion as well. Pg music band in a box 2015 for mac. I find it a fairly valuable book to my education because despite the fact that it went almost overboard with some of the information, it still defined the topic really well. It shed light on a lot of things that are normally not as deliberated. Throughout the book, many conclusions and generalizations were made. Many of which were well-informed, however, at the same time a few of them were discreetly biased. 1212 gucci belt serial number.
He made some assumptions and said some things that may not be agreed with by everyone. This sort of limited what he could teach and at the same time, gave some outlooks that other historians could not have given because they didn’t care about the topics as much as he. Religion and Literature are good examples of that, Leach’s attachment to those two things reflected in the way that he talked about them. This sometimes may have blind folded him when it came to other topics that didn’t hold such a strong feeling for but certainly helped out with those that he did.
I thought that the book was, in fact, very interesting and I learned a lot from it. I understand exactly what went on and why when it came to the consumer market switching into a capitalist gear. He didn’t leave very much unclear and his explanations for things were very well thought out. The fact that he talked about maybe a little more than he needed to get his point across was both a blessing and a curse in that you learned and understood more, but occasionally it just seemed to complicate things.
He obviously has an extremely deep knowledge about this topic and perhaps that’s maybe why he wrote a book about it (duh), but over all, I think it is a very good book that was written with even the least informed reader in mind. Leach made it so that anyone, whether you knew a lot about the subject or not, could understand what went on and why. Any ideas that needed to maybe be explained to the commoner were explained and it was very helpful in understanding the book. I appreciated that a lot, but I am not the most learned person and I don’t know a whole lot on this subject or it’s background.
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This monumental work of cultural history was nominated for a National Book Award. It chronicles America's transformation, beginning in 1880, into a nation of consumers, devoted to a cult of comfort, bodily well-being, and endless acquisition. 24 pages of photos.
In Country of Exiles, William Leach, whose Land of Desire was a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the troubling effects of our national love affair with mobility. He shows us how the impulse to pull up stakes and find a new frontier has always battled with the need to put down roots, and how a new cosmopolitanism has seized our national identity. Leach takes us across a featureless America, where strip malls homogenize a once varied and majestic landscape, and where casinos displace the Native American spiritual connection to the land. He shows us a culture where everyone, from CEOs to office temps, abandons the notion of company loyalty, and where rootless academics posit a world without borders. With compelling vision and insight, Leach reveals the profound but often hidden impact of America's disintegrating sense of place on our national and individual psyche. From the Trade Paperback edition.
'This history is as lively as its subject, clarifying the genealogy of the successive rebellions that marked the unfolding of modernism.' -- New Yorker
For more than a century, Times Square has mesmerized the world with the spectacle of its dazzling supersigns, its theaters, and its often-seedy nightlife. New York City’s iconic crossroads has drawn crowds of revelers, thrill-seekers, and other urban denizens, not to mention lavish outpourings of advertising and development money. Many have hotly debated the recent transformation of this legendary intersection, with voices typically falling into two opposing camps. Some applaud a blighted red-light district becoming a big-budget, mainstream destination. Others lament an urban zone of lawless possibility being replaced by a Disneyfied, theme-park version of New York. In Money Jungle, Benjamin Chesluk shows that what is really at stake in Times Square are fundamental questions about city life—questions of power, pleasure, and what it means to be a citizen in contemporary urban space. Chesluk weaves together surprising stories of everyday life in and around the Times Square redevelopment, tracing the connections between people from every level of this grand project in social and spatial engineering: the developers, architects, and designers responsible for reshaping the urban public spaces of Times Square and Forty-second Street; the experimental Midtown Community Court and its Times Square Ink. job-training program for misdemeanor criminals; encounters between NYPD officers and residents of Hell’s Kitchen; and angry confrontations between city planners and neighborhood activists over the future of the area. With an eye for offbeat, telling details and a perspective that is at once sympathetic and critical, Chesluk documents how the redevelopment has tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to reshape the people and places of Times Square. The result is a colorful and engaging portrait, illustrated by stunning photographs by long-time local photographer Maggie Hopp, of the street life, politics, economics, and cultural forces that mold America’s urban centers.
In the present electronic torrent of MTV and teen flicks, Nintendo and Air Jordan advertisements, consumer culture is an unmistakably important—and controversial—dimension of modern childhood. Historians and social commentators have typically assumed that the child consumer became significant during the postwar television age. But the child consumer was already an important phenomenon in the early twentieth century. The family, traditionally the primary institution of child socialization, began to face an array of new competitors who sought to put their own imprint on children's acculturation to consumer capitalism. Advertisers, children's magazine publishers, public schools, child experts, and children's peer groups alternately collaborated with, and competed against, the family in their quest to define children's identities. At stake in these conflicts and collaborations was no less than the direction of American consumer society—would children's consumer training rein in hedonistic excesses or contribute to the spread of hollow, commercial values? Not simply a new player in the economy, the child consumer became a lightning rod for broader concerns about the sanctity of the family and the authority of the market in modern capitalist culture. Lisa Jacobson reveals how changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity shaped the ways Americans understood the virtues and vices of boy and girl consumers—and why boys in particular emerged as the heroes of the new consumer age. She also analyzes how children's own behavior, peer culture, and emotional investment in goods influenced the dynamics of the new consumer culture. Raising Consumers is a provocative examination of the social, economic, and cultural forces that produced and ultimately legitimized a distinctive children's consumer culture in the early twentieth century.
An illuminating biography of the man who taught Americans “how to win friends and influence people” Before Stephen Covey, Oprah Winfrey, and Malcolm Gladwell there was Dale Carnegie. His book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, became a best seller worldwide, and Life magazine named him one of “the most important Americans of the twentieth century.” This is the first full-scale biography of this influential figure. Dale Carnegie was born in rural Missouri, his father a poor farmer, his mother a successful preacher. To make ends meet he tried his hand at various sales jobs, and his failure to convince his customers to buy what he had to offer eventually became the fuel behind his future glory. Carnegie quickly figured out that something was amiss in American education and in the ways businesspeople related to each other. What he discovered was as simple as it was profound: Understanding people’s needs and desires is paramount in any successful enterprise. Carnegie conceived his book to help people learn to relate to one another and enrich their lives through effective communication. His success was extraordinary, so hungry was 1920s America for a little psychological insight that was easy to apply to everyday affairs. Self-help Messiah tells the story of Carnegie’s personal journey and how it gave rise to the movement of self-help and personal reinvention.
The essays in this collection explore the history of consumption by synthesizing discrete historical literatures on consumer culture, gender and the history of technology. The authors emphasize the agency of particular groups, including consumers, workers, manufacturers, and 'mediators'.
This groundbreaking book examines the relationship between the development of the consumer society and the rise of collecting by individuals and institutions. Rusell Belk considers how and why people collect, as individuals, corporations and museums, and the impact this collecting has on us and our culture. Collecting in a Consumer Society outlines the history of museum collecting from ancient civilizations to the present. It also looks at aspects of consumer culture - advertizing, department stores, mass merchandizing, consumer desires, and how this relates to the activity of collecting. Collecting in a Consumer Society is the first book to focus on collecting as material consumption. This is a provocative and engaging book, essential reading for anyone involved with the process of collecting.
In The Challenge of American History, Louis Masur brings together a sampling of recent scholarship to determine the key issues preoccupying historians of American history and to contemplate the discipline's direction for the future. The fifteen summary essays included in this volume allow professional historians, history teachers, and students to grasp in a convenient and accessible form what historians have been writing about.
Using numerous sources, such as contemporary etiquette manuals, society papers and columns, novels, magazines, private correspondence, and diaries, 'Displaying Women' vividly depicts the custom and culture of New York 'society' women from roughly 1870 to 1920.
This book traces the rise and decline of what Theodore Roosevelt once called the 'most American thing in America.' The Chautauqua movement began in 1874 on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in western New York. More than a college or a summer resort or a religious assembly, it was a composite of all of these—completely derivative yet brilliantly innovative. For five decades, Chautauqua dominated adult education and reached millions with its summer assemblies, reading clubs, and traveling circuits. Scholars have long struggled to make sense of Chautauqua's pervasive yet disorganized presence in American life. In this critical study, Andrew Rieser weaves the threads of Chautauqua into a single story and places it at the vital center of fin de siècle cultural and political history. Famous for its commitment to democracy, women's rights, and social justice, Chautauqua was nonetheless blind to issues of class and race. How could something that trumpeted democracy be so undemocratic in practice? The answer, Rieser argues, lies in the historical experience of the white, Protestant middle classes, who struggled to reconcile their parochial interests with radically new ideas about social progress and the state. The Chautauqua Moment brings color to a colorless demographic and spins a fascinating tale of modern liberalism's ambivalent but enduring cultural legacy.
With 32 pages of full-color inserts and black-and-white illustrations throughout. From one of our most highly regarded historians, here is an original and engrossing chronicle of nineteenth-century America’s infatuation with butterflies, and the story of the naturalists who unveiled the mysteries of their existence. A product of William Leach’s lifelong love of butterflies, this engaging and elegantly illustrated history shows how Americans from all walks of life passionately pursued butterflies, and how through their discoveries and observations they transformed the character of natural history. Leach focuses on the correspondence and scientific writings of half a dozen pioneering lepidopterists who traveled across the country and throughout the world, collecting and studying unknown and exotic species. In a book as full of life as the subjects themselves and foregrounding a collecting culture now on the brink of vanishing, Leach reveals how the beauty of butterflies led Americans into a deeper understanding of the natural world. He shows, too, that the country’s enthusiasm for butterflies occurred at the very moment that another form of beauty—the technological and industrial objects being displayed at world’s fairs and commercial shows—was emerging, and that Americans’ attraction to this new beauty would eventually, and at great cost, take precedence over nature in general and butterflies in particular.
In 1912 James Reese Europe made history by conducting his 125-member Clef Club Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. The first concert by an African American ensemble at the esteemed venue was more than just a concert--it was a political act of desegregation, a defiant challenge to the status quo in American music. In this book, David Gilbert explores how Europe and other African American performers, at the height of Jim Crow, transformed their racial difference into the mass-market commodity known as 'black music.' Gilbert shows how Europe and others used the rhythmic sounds of ragtime, blues, and jazz to construct new representations of black identity, challenging many of the nation's preconceived ideas about race, culture, and modernity and setting off a musical craze in the process. Gilbert sheds new light on the little-known era of African American music and culture between the heyday of minstrelsy and the Harlem Renaissance. He demonstrates how black performers played a pioneering role in establishing New York City as the center of American popular music, from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway, and shows how African Americans shaped American mass culture in their own image.
From the clamshell razors and homemade lye depilatories used in colonial America to the diode lasers and prescription pharmaceuticals available today, Americans have used a staggering array of tools to remove hair deemed unsightly, unnatural, or excessive. This is true especially for women and girls; conservative estimates indicate that 99% of American women have tried hair removal, and at least 85% regularly remove hair from their faces, armpits, legs, and bikini lines. How and when does hair become a problem—what makes some growth “excessive”? Who or what separates the necessary from the superfluous? In Plucked, historian Rebecca Herzig addresses these questions about hair removal. She shows how, over time, dominant American beliefs about visible hair changed: where once elective hair removal was considered a “mutilation” practiced primarily by “savage” men, by the turn of the twentieth century, hair-free faces and limbs were expected for women. Visible hair growth—particularly on young, white women—came to be perceived as a sign of political extremism, sexual deviance, or mental illness. By the turn of the twenty-first century, more and more Americans were waxing, threading, shaving, or lasering themselves smooth. Herzig’s extraordinary account also reveals some of the collateral damages of the intensifying pursuit of hair-free skin. Moving beyond the experiences of particular patients or clients, Herzig describes the surprising histories of race, science, industry, and medicine behind today's hair-removing tools. Plucked is an unsettling, gripping, and original tale of the lengths to which Americans will go to remove hair.
The curator of the Political History Collection at the Smithsonian Institution explores how big business--with the help of the federal government--became expert in manipulating advertising and public relations to inflame Americans desire for consumption. UP.
Vegetarianism has been practiced in the United States since the country's founding, yet the early years of the movement have been woefully misunderstood and understudied. Through the Civil War, the vegetarian movement focused on social and political reform, but by the late nineteenth century, the movement became a path for personal strength and success in a newly individualistic, consumption-driven economy. This development led to greater expansion and acceptance of vegetarianism in mainstream society. So argues Adam D. Shprintzen in his lively history of early American vegetarianism and social reform. From Bible Christians to Grahamites, the American Vegetarian Society to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Shprintzen explores the diverse proponents of reform-motivated vegetarianism and explains how each of these groups used diet as a response to changing social and political conditions. By examining the advocates of vegetarianism, including institutions, organizations, activists, and publications, Shprintzen explores how an idea grew into a nationwide community united not only by diet but also by broader goals of social reform.
In early twentieth-century America, affluent city-dwellers made a habit of venturing out of doors and vacationing in resorts and national parks. Yet the rich and the privileged were not the only ones who sought respite in nature. In this pathbreaking book, historian Colin Fisher demonstrates that working-class white immigrants and African Americans in rapidly industrializing Chicago also fled the urban environment during their scarce leisure time. If they had the means, they traveled to wilderness parks just past the city limits as well as to rural resorts in Wisconsin and Michigan. But lacking time and money, they most often sought out nature within the city itself--at urban parks and commercial groves, along the Lake Michigan shore, even in vacant lots. Chicagoans enjoyed a variety of outdoor recreational activities in these green spaces, and they used them to forge ethnic and working-class community. While narrating a crucial era in the history of Chicago's urban development, Fisher makes important interventions in debates about working-class leisure, the history of urban parks, environmental justice, the African American experience, immigration history, and the cultural history of nature.
The only book to connect the everyday world of the 20-something undergraduate consumer with sound sociological analysis of the world of consumption Enchanting a Disenchanted World, Third Edition examines Disney, malls, cruise lines, Las Vegas, the world wide web, Planet Hollywood, credit cards, and all the other ways we now consume. Thoroughly updated to reflect the recent economic recession and the impact of the internet, bestselling author George Ritzer continues to explore this book’s central thesis: that our society has undergone fundamental change because of the way and the level at which we consume. This Third Edition demonstrates how we have created new 'cathedrals' of consumption (places that enchant us so as to entice us to stay longer and consume more) while continuing to take capitalism to a new level. These places of consumption, whether in our homes, the mall, or cyberspace, are in a constant state of 'enchanting the disenchanted,' luring us through new spectacles because their rational qualities are both necessary and deadening at the same time. New and Hallmark Features Offers a unique analysis of the world of consumption, especially the settings in which consumption takes place Discusses the recent global economic recession throughout Offers rich details on consuming in such places as Las Vegas, Disney World, on cruise ships, in Wal-Mart, at McDonald’s, and, new to this edition, on the Web Includes a wide range of theoretical perspectives—Marxian, Weberian, critical theory, postmodern theory—as well as a number of concepts such as hyperconsumption, implosion, simulation, and time and space to show students how sociological theory can be applied to everyday phenomena
William Leach Land Of Desire Pdf Online
Mass consumption is a defining feature of modern American culture. During the 20th century, mass production, discretionary income, and modern advertising combined to create and fulfill demand for more products than ever before. From butchers and bakers to big-box retailers, the story of the buying and selling of goods tells the history of our cities from a unique perspective. The Good Life approaches Sacramento's history from the bottom up, with a look at the city's past from the perspective of ordinary citizens. From the gold rush to the dot-com bubble and beyond, it tells the story of changing times, changing styles, and changing fortunes, and their effects on the lives of the people of Sacramento.
William Leach Land Of Desire Pdf Free
While elite merchants, financiers, shopkeepers, and customers were the most visible producers, consumers, and distributors of goods and capital in the nineteenth century, they were certainly not alone in shaping the economy. Lurking in the shadows of capitalism's past are those who made markets by navigating a range of new financial instruments, information systems, and modes of transactions: prostitutes, dealers in used goods, mock auctioneers, illegal slavers, traffickers in stolen horses, emigrant runners, pilfering dock workers, and other ordinary people who, through their transactions and lives, helped to make capitalism as much as it made them. Capitalism by Gaslight illuminates American economic history by emphasizing the significance of these markets and the cultural debates they provoked. These essays reveal that the rules of economic engagement were still being established in the nineteenth century: delineations between legal and illegal, moral and immoral, acceptable and unsuitable were far from clear. The contributors examine the fluid mobility and unstable value of people and goods, the shifting geographies and structures of commercial institutions, the blurred boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity, and the daily lives of men and women who participated creatively—and often subversively—in American commerce. With subjects ranging from women's studies and African American history to material and consumer culture, this compelling volume illustrates that when hidden forms of commerce are brought to light, they can become flashpoints revealing the tensions, fissures, and inequities inherent in capitalism itself. Contributors: Paul Erickson, Robert J. Gamble, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Corey Goettsch, Joshua R. Greenberg, Katie M. Hemphill, Craig B. Hollander, Brian P. Luskey, Will B. Mackintosh, Adam Mendelsohn, Brendan P. O'Malley, Michael D. Thompson, Wendy A. Woloson.