Book Review

Pamela Walker Laird's book on advertising between 1820 and 1920 joins the list of important works that have helped us understand the history of advertising, among them those by Stephen Fox, Jackson Lears, Daniel Pope, Susan Strasser, and Richard S. Tedlow. In many ways, Laird takes her inspiration from, and explores the world that antedated, what the late Roland Marchand described in Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (1985). Her central argument revolves about what she sees as fundamental shifts in how advertisers used visual images to convey a vision of progress. In cities during the middle of the nineteenth century, print messages, mostly by retailers, replaced the voices of street criers as business people tried to reach wider audiences. By the late nineteenth century, elaborate visual images had replaced densely packed announcements of goods when business owners and managers increasingly relied on vivid renderings of factories, of themselves, and of symbols of wealth, power, and beauty. Filled with optimism, these entrepreneurs linked industry with material and cultural progress. Over time, but clearly by the mid-1890s, entrepreneurs, spurred by the economic crisis of that decade, increasingly turned to professional advertising specialists who offered a different version of progress, one that connected brand names and relatively uncluttered images with their own cultural authority, consumer purchases, and the nation's destiny.

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