Description
The Industrial Revolution was previously understood as having awakened an enormous, unquenchable thirst for material consumption. People up and down the social order had discovered and were indulging in the most extraordinary passion for consumer merchandise in quantities and varieties that had been unimaginable to their parents and grandparents. It was indeed a revolution, but a consumer revolution at the start.
In Face Value, Cary Carson expands and updates his groundbreaking earlier work to address the intriguing question of how Americans became the world's consummate consumers. Prior to the rise of gentry culture in eighteenth-century North America, there was still a decided sameness to people's material lives. About mid-century, though, a lust for fancy goods, coupled with social aspiration, began to transform American society.
Carson here addresses the intriguing question of how Americans developed the reputation for avid consumption. Both elegantly written and engagingly argued, the book reveals how the rise of the gentry culture in eighteenth-century North America gave rise to a consumer economy.
Author: Cary Carson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 08/03/2017
Pages: 312
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.03lbs
Size: 8.74h x 6.95w x 0.65d
ISBN13: 9780813939377
ISBN10: 0813939372
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States | Colonial Period (1600-1775)
- History | Social History
- Business & Economics | Economic History
About the Author
Cary Carson, retired Vice President of the Research Division at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, is coeditor with Carl Lounsbury of The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg and editor of Becoming Americans: Our Struggle to Be Both Free and Equal.