| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ted Ownby. American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830–1998. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. 228. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.95.

"We are all consumers now," at least according to Ted Ownby. He sets himself the formidable task of explaining how this came about in the most unlikely of places. Eschewing older historical questions of regional distinctiveness and newer concerns that consumerism is either commodity fetishism or marketplace hegemony, Ownby sets out to "examine what goods meant to different Mississippians as individuals, within their communities, and as forms of communication and miscommunication" (p. 3). Drawing on Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (1982) and Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (1990), he sees the story of consumer behavior as "questions of conversations" among black and white, poor and rich, male and female, young and old, urban and rural Mississippians from the 1830s through the 1990s (p. 3). Ownby argues that shopping, goods, and consumer culture promised both potential and real liberation. "Even if they offer no ultimate solutions or redemptions," he concludes, "goods allow significant forms of freedom" (p. 148). These freedoms of abundance, goods, choice, and novelty (pp. 1–2) reflected American dreams that were also much sought after by Mississippians. . . .

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