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Kraft offers an illuminating case study in the impact of technology on industry and society-and a provocative chapter in the cultural history of America.

Winner of the Hagley Prize in Business History from The Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History ConferenceSelected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleOriginally published in 1999. Imagining Consumers tells for the first time the story of American consumer society from the perspective of mass-market manufacturers and retailers. It relates the trials and tribulations of china and glassware producers in their contest for the hearts of the working- and middle-class women who made up more than eighty percent of those buying mass-manufactured goods by the 1920s. Based on extensive research in untapped corporate archives, Imagining Consumers supplies a fresh appraisal of the history of American business, culture, and consumerism. Case studies illuminate decision making in key firms-including the Homer Laughlin China Company, the Kohler Company, and Corning Glass Works-and consider the design and development of ubiquitous lines such as Fiesta tableware and Pyrex Ovenware.

Arguing that the underground drug culture had origins other than in federal prohibition can tell us as we face questions about drug policy today.

Her interdisciplinary study draws from the fields of business history, engineering, technology, architecture, and theories of modernity. Why did some people want to rationalize the factory, she asks, and how did the system impact those who worked under it?

Through this story, Laird shows how and why-in the intense competitions for both markets and cultural authority-the creators of advertisements laid claim to "progressand used it to legitimate their places in American business and culture.

But large-scale naval construction in the 1920s eroded production flexibility, Heinrich argues, and since then, ill-conceived merchant marine policies and naval contracting procedures have brought about a structural crisis in American shipbuilding and the demise of the venerable Philadelphia shipyards.

Rees shows that how we obtain and preserve perishable food is related to our changing relationship with the natural world.

A Nation of Small Shareholders puts the role of individual investors in broader, long-term perspective.

The recipient of the Society of American Archivists' Waldo Gifford Leland Prize and the Association for Business Communication's Alpha Kappa Psi Award for Distinguished Publication on Business Communication, Yates discusses how modern managerial systems evolved within the American business system.

In an effort to mitigate historians' flattening of workers into the two-dimensional plane of politics and protest, Bodnar revives workers and the world in which they lived by conducting oral interviews with textile workers, coal miners, steelworkers, and others in Pennsylvania.

In the history of the American auto mechanic, Borg finds the origins of a persistent anxiety that even today accompanies the prospect of taking one's car in for repair.

In her concluding chapters and epilogue, Bix shows how the issue changed during World War II and in postwar America and brings the debate forward to show its relevance to modern readers.

The recording studio, she argues, is at the center of musical culture in the twentieth century.

It shows how the industry's massive pollution loads significantly disrupted local environments and communities, leading to a long struggle to regulate and control that pollution.

Her study extends into Prohibition and discusses the various effects that scattering vice and banning alcohol had on commercial nightlife.

American historians and anyone interested in the history of labor or Las Vegas will find this account highly original, insightful, and even-handed.

Reflecting on the experiences and contributions of the company's engineers and physicists, Ndiaye traces Du Pont's transformation into one of the corporate models of American success.

She concludes that the goal uniting the various forms and applications of photographic production in that era was the increased rationalization of the modern economy through a set of interlocking managerial innovations, technologies that sought to redesign not only industrial production but the modern subject as well.

In addition, this detailed industry case study helps explain information technology's so-called productivity paradox, showing that firms took roughly two decades to achieve the initial computerization and process integration that the industry set as objectives in the 1950s.

Deeply researched and strikingly original, this study contributes a vivid chapter to the story of America's industrial revolution.

Hounshell chronicles how painfully Ford learned this lesson and recounts how the successful mass production of automobiles led to the establishment of an "ethos of mass production,to an era in which propoments of "Fordismargued that mass production would solve all of America's social problems.

The fascinating stories behind their design, construction, and marketing reveal in rich detail how these buildings became cultural symbols that shaped the urban landscape.

Tracing the transformation of the film industry into a legitimate "big businessof the 1920s, and explaining the fate of the female filmmaker during the silent era, Mahar demonstrates how industrial growth and change can unexpectedly open-and close-opportunities for women.