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Reviews
| Goods for Sale: Products and Advertising in the Massachusetts Industrial Age, by Chaim M. Rosenberg. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. 248 pages. $29.95, paper.
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| Starting with trade cards which advertised a host of commercial products, Chaim Rosenberg's Goods for Sale surveys the contribution of Massachusetts in shaping American industry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Readers more familiar with the seminal role of the state in influencing colonial America will be surprised that its entrepreneurs led the nation's transition from an agrarian society to the machine age and ultimately the painful realties of deindustrialization in the twentieth century. Rosenberg chronicles the origins of numerous industries such as textiles, shoemaking, medicinal products, musical instruments, and even automobiles in locales such as Boston, Lowell, Springfield, Lynn, and Worcester County. He also includes vignettes of numerous entrepreneurs such as Nathan Appleton and Isaac Singer and illustrates the role of perseverance, luck, and a burgeoning national and global economy in shaping both their fortunes and American commerce. Rosenberg's survey is strongest in its portrait of the "Medicine Men" of Boston such as Eben Norton Horsford, who promoted the healthy benefits of acid phosphate, and Lynn's Lydia Pinkham, an early feminist in the temperance movement, whose company combined maternal nursing and a little alcohol into the highly profitable Vegetable Compound for Women. Pinkham invented her concoction in the 1870s and, until its demise during Progressive Era regulation, the popularity of the Vegetable Compound for ailments such as "chronic weakness" and "nervousness" spoke to the difficulty of life for women during a period of rapid social change. Such stories are instructive as to the nature of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, in part because dramatic social and economic changes often occurred earlier in Massachusetts than more widely known developments in cities such as New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. |
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While Rosenberg's brief accounts of companies and entrepreneurs in the state will be of interest to students of Massachusetts history, the beautiful illustrations of over a hundred trade cards represents both the book's greatest weakness its greatest potential. Since Rosenberg relies on a modest number of secondary sources and no primary sources other than the trade cards, it is especially frustrating that Goods for Sale displays so little effort to analyze the actual cards which decorate its pages. Much of the narrative includes no reference to the illustrations and, with a few exceptions, Rosenberg rarely examines the cards' images and text to enrich his analysis. The author states that the "extravagant claims written on the back of each card still make for interesting reading" and yet often fails to include such information for the reader or to attempt to deconstruct the cards' meanings in light of the larger historical context. Rather than exploring the emerging role of advertising in both reflecting and distorting realities within American society during the period, Rosenberg takes the cards seemingly at face value and describes ads for sewing machines and parlor stoves as simply "scenes from American life around 1880." |
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Nevertheless, the trade cards in Goods for Sale offer middle, high school, and college students a provocative and accessible window through which to engage historical issues in Massachusetts and beyond. Trade cards for such products as home appliances, clothing, lawnmowers, and bicycles encourage teachers and students, including those who struggle with reading and interpreting historical text, to decode important messages concerning social class and gender and the use the history of American advertising to explore the always varied impact of the Industrial Revolution. Although Rosenberg's account illuminates the state's important entrepreneurs, a student's careful historical analysis of the trade cards will also raise important questions about the largely anonymous, and often immigrant, workers whose labor fueled the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, the production and consumption of trade cards provides an opportunity to examine middle class consumers who read, collected, or rejected the cards and their messages and the complex role of commerce in shaping mass culture in the United States. The result of such historical analysis would be a far more nuanced, balanced, and rich narrative about Massachusetts, industry, and the creation of modern America. |
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| Illinois State University, Normal, IL |
Richard Hughes |
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