| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture. By Barry Shank. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. xx, 328 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-231-11878-3.)

A Token of My Affection purports to examine the growth and significance of greeting cards and the greeting card industry in the United States. Barry Shank offers four assertions as scaffolding for his analysis: (1) from 1840 to 1960, "greeting cards became significant objects used in the cultural display of emotional eloquence and social connection in the United States"; (2) the emotions displayed in cards were conditioned by organization and bureaucracy; (3) "emotional communication in a culture structured by business is fraught with danger"; and (4) the images and sentimental language on cards do not hide the social tensions that produced the need for them but rather often revel in these tensions with "a carnivalesque, yet forced, gaiety" (pp. 7–8). The time periods explored in the book are 1840–1890, 1906–1957, and the late 1950s to the early 1990s.

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