Financing the American Dream – A Cultural History of Consumer Credit
Autor Lendol Calderen Limba Engleză Paperback – 25 feb 2001
Calder presents the first book-length social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources--including personal diaries and letters, government and business records, newspapers, advertisements, movies, and the words of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum--to show that debt has always been with us. He vigorously challenges the idea that consumer credit has eroded traditional values. Instead, he argues, monthly payments have imposed strict, externally reinforced disciplines on consumers, making the culture of consumption less a playground for hedonists than an extension of what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of disciplined rationality and hard work. Throughout, Calder keeps in clear view the human face of credit relations. He re-creates the Dickensian world of nineteenth-century pawnbrokers, takes us into the dingy backstairs offices of loan sharks, into small-town shops and New York department stores, and explains who resorted to which types of credit and why. He also traces the evolving moral status of consumer credit, showing how it changed from a widespread but morally dubious practice into an almost universal and generally accepted practice by World War II. Combining clear, rigorous arguments with a colorful, narrative style, Financing the American Dream will attract a wide range of academic and general readers and change how we understand one of the most important and overlooked aspects of American social and economic life.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780691074559
ISBN-10: 0691074550
Pagini: 400
Ilustrații: 19 halftones
Dimensiuni: 155 x 233 x 33 mm
Greutate: 0.6 kg
Ediția:Revised
Editura: Princeton University Press
Locul publicării:Princeton, United States
ISBN-10: 0691074550
Pagini: 400
Ilustrații: 19 halftones
Dimensiuni: 155 x 233 x 33 mm
Greutate: 0.6 kg
Ediția:Revised
Editura: Princeton University Press
Locul publicării:Princeton, United States
Notă biografică
Descriere
Presents the social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. This book focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of consumer credit were established. It challenges the idea that consumer credit has eroded traditional values.