Synopses & Reviews
Review
"A surprising, engaging portrayal of the ways that mass consumption transformed America from the small scale to the large, as public authorities intervened massively and consequentially on behalf of their own visions of a consumer society. The book's illustrations alone offer a striking album of local life's texture across four turbulent decades of incessant change." Viviana A. Zelizer, author of The Social Meaning of Money
Review
"The story is familiar. Historians and social critics have told it for years, from multiple angles. Yet few accounts are as provocative or original as A Consumers' Republic." The New York Times
Review
"Shopping malls, suburban neighborhoods, union halls, picket lines, and government offices. These are the places focused on in Cohen's compelling examination of the development of the United States as a consumers republic since the late 1930s. In the process she transforms the way we understand postwar America." Daniel Horowitz, author of The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979
Review
"A Consumers Republic is a real tour de force. It is impressive in its sheer sweep through a century of complicated history, ranging from popular culture through political protest to demographic analysis. It takes seriously the now clichéd mantra of 'race, class, and gender,' by showing just how race and class and gender shaped and were shaped by the new idea that consumption defines what it means to be an American. It weaves local and even personal history through a national narrative, and ties it all into clear themes of struggle, triumph, and loss." Jennifer L. Hochschild, editor of Perspectives on Politics
Review
"A Consumers Republic is a magnificent, path-breaking achievement. Lizabeth Cohen lays bare the deeply transformative impact of mass prosperity on the texture of American social, political, and cultural life in the post-World War II era - its triumphs and costs, as well as its limitations. An unflaggingly provocative, indispensable book." David Kennedy, author of Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
Review
"Lizabeth Cohen's refreshingly bold and ambitious book is an effort to explain how the republic for which we stand came to be shaped by our economy's insatiable demand for demand. Cohen breaks sharply with an often frustrating tendency in contemporary historiography. For the past two or three decades, historians have been studiously thinking small....One hopes that her book will stimulate her colleagues to take similar risks, even the risk of emulating historians of previous generations whose efforts at intellectual synthesis and grand narrative are treated now with contempt by postmodern pygmies." Alan Wolfe, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
About the Author
Lizabeth Cohen is Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the Department of History at Harvard University. She is the author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919—1939, which won the Bancroft Prize and the Philip Taft Labor History Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written many articles and essays and is coauthor (with David Kennedy) of The American Pageant. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters.