| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Marina Moskowitz. Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 300. $45.00.

In this well-researched monograph, Marina Moskowitz traces the evolution of the American concept of the standard of living from 1870 to the 1920s through fascinating case studies on silverplate flatware, bathroom fixtures, mail-order homes, and zoning plans. These wide-ranging, interdisciplinary case studies draw on a rich variety of materials that move beyond prescriptive sources and go behind the scenes to find out how "cultural educators" (p. 2) and a host of economic and social forces actually gave rise to the idea of a standard of living. Through her close readings of business correspondence, trade catalogs, advertising, and city plans, as well as fiction, cartoons, material objects, and the built environment itself, Moskowitz gives new definition to this elusive concept, tying it to the vast transformations in production, distribution, and consumption that led to a national consumer culture by the 1920s. This standard of living reflected aspirations, and as measure of the quality of life was "materialized in the settings of everyday life" (p. 2).

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