American dreams in Mississippi : consumers, poverty & culture, 1830-1998 / Ted Ownby.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ownby, Ted.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Consumption (Economics)--Mississippi--History.

Consumption (Economics).

Rural poor--Mississippi--History.

Rural poor.

African American consumers--Mississippi--History.

African American consumers.

Consumers--Mississippi--History.

Consumers.

Mississippi--Economic consumers.

Mississippi.

Mississippi--Economic conditions.

Consumption (Economics)--History--Mississippi.

Rural poor--History--Mississippi.

African American consumers--History--Mississippi.

Consumers--History--Mississippi.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (228 p. ) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that have fueled the growth of consumer culture in the United States would seem to have little place in the history of Mississippi--a state long associated with poverty, inequality, and rural life. But as Ted Ownby demonstrates in this innovative study, consumer goods and shopping have played important roles in the development of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum era to the present. After examining the general and plantation stores of the nineteenth century, a period when shopping habits were stratified according to racial and class hierarchies, Ownby traces the development of new types of stores and buying patterns in the twentieth century, when women and African Americans began to wield new forms of economic power. Using sources as diverse as store ledgers, blues lyrics, and the writings of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and Will Percy, he illuminates the changing relationships among race, rural life, and consumer goods and, in the process, offers a new way to understand the connection between power and culture in the American South.

Contents:

Men buying cloth; the limits of shopping among nineteenth-century farmers

Wealthy men, wealthy women, and slaves as Antebellum consumers

You don't want nothing; goods, plantation labor, and the meanings of freedom, 1865-1920s

New stores and new shoppers, 1880-1930

Gladys Smith, Dorothy Dickins, and consumer ideals for women, 1920s-1950s

Goods, migration, and the blues, 1920s-1950s

Percy, Wright, Faulkner, and Welty; Montgomery Ward Snopes and the intellectual challenges of consumption

White Christmas; boycotts and the meanings of shopping, 1960-1990.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [193]-215) and index.

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

9798890867704

9780807874691

0807874698