| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 211 words from this article are provided below; about 368 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. By Regina Lee Blaszczyk. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xvi, 380 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-6193-4.)

Imagining Consumers is an innovative study of an important dimension of the consumer revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the "firms that made and distributed the most commonplace and meaningful artifacts of the American consumer revolution." Rather than examining the big businesses that mass-produced items for popular consumption, Regina Lee Blaszczyk analyzes firms that engaged in "flexible batch production" and specialized in "short runs of highly varied goods, quickly changing from one color, fashion, style, or price as the market dictated." Businesses such as the Homer Laughlin China Company, Salem China Company, Kohler Company, and Corning Incorporated produced valued consumer durables that turned "houses into homes": the plates, cutlery, pottery, and glass that were given pride of place as markers of domestic taste and aesthetic judgment. Blaszczyk makes the convincing case that, by "democratizing things" and selling them at outlets such as the Sears catalog and F. W. Woolworth, those firms played a crucial rule in promoting consumption among the middle and working classes, even as those classes shaped, through their purchasing habits, the styles of consumer goods being produced. . . .

There are about 368 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.