Book Description
The history of consumption is a prism through which many aspects of social and political life may be viewed. The essays in this collection represent a variety of approaches and raise such themes as consumption and democracy, the development of a global economy, the role of the state, the centrality of consumption to Cold War politics, the importance of the Second World War as a historical divide, the language of consumption, the contexts of locality, race, ethnicity, gender, and class, and the environmental consequences of twentieth-century consumer society. They explore the role of the historian as social, political, and moral critic. Unlike other studies of twentieth-century consumption, this book provides international comparisons.
Book Description
The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today.
De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it--first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.
Customer Reviews:
A cleverly constructed book.......2006-11-10
This is a very clever book. The author pinned her explanation of American influence in Europe on canny business practices. The service ethic. Big-branding. Supermarkets. These are some of the themes that are worked over to make the case. The book is delighfully stuffed with anecdotes, vignettes and odd facts and statistics to lend it the feel of visiting a large emporium of ideas. Personally, I liked this 'shelf browsing' feel to the chapters.
The book has a few serious downsides which marr its central argument. First and foremost, the author takes little cognisance of the influence of WWII on shaping European attitudes towards American culture. Secondly, in the two generations after WWII more Europeans (percentage) speak English in order to accommodate their ambitions. The author attributes the creeping growth of English pre-WWII to business needs (strange to me that she singles out the Rotarians as particularly influential). However, that does not explain its widesprgead endorsement by the general citizenry after WWII. This brings me the third issue, the lack of attention paid to the rise of youth culture - largely driven by perceptions of American youth in the fifties. Music, rock'n'roll and the drug culture were directed to a large extent by American tastes. Consumerism is too broad a concept to explain the uptake of American habits.
Despite these lacunae, the book is a a thought-provoking exercise and though the prose is bit attenuated at times, it is overall readable and stimualting.
Exquisitely Written.......2006-02-04
What the other reviews fail to convey about this wonderful book is that the writing is exquisite. Each chapter uses real-life examples, ironies and juxtapositions to vividly evoke contrasts between America and Europe and demonstrate the course of change. When the chapters arc to their conclusion, you feel a real emotional and intellectual punch. History writing just doesn't get any better than this.
BRAVO de Grazia!.......2005-11-29
As someone who reads for a living, let me commend the work of Professor Victoria de Grazia: Irresistible Empire. You see, to write a review, one must not only READ the book, but UNDERSTAND what's read! Professor de Grazia makes reading her book an educational,enlightening pleasure.I read Irresistable Empire prior to interviewing Prof.de Grazia on my radio show. My producer Bun-E and I select books/interviews that will enlighten and entertain our diverse audience. The book MUST be 'readable', for which Irresistable Empire receives an A+AND relevant, another A+!!We've been told by listeners that this book's a great choice for Christmas lists! The entertaining style that Victoria de Grazia writes enhances the reader's ability to understand the "Americanization of Europe" - as much has been written about the subject but little has been understood prior to this book. A book that educates in a very entertaining style?-that's Irresistable Empire!!!
A shame to kill so many innocent trees........2005-10-24
This book is flat out too long. The author's argument is simple. So simple, in fact, that this would have made an excellent journal article. Instead, the author drags it out, and drags, and drags, and drags and...
you get the idea. Read the book reviews instead. You'll save yourself a few hours.
An Empire Is In China, Not America........2005-08-09
Triumph of the American consumers over Europe? Never in a million years! What we need is a little of the European culture to rub off on us crude Americans, especially those with all the money who flaunt their wealth and power. It is only temporary. Any disaster could wipe them out and they'd be as poor as some of us and have no power of persuasion to the king pins. Today, in America, money is all that matters. If you have none, then you are a nobody.
I know you can't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes an unusual cover can grab a reader's attention when another more drab would not. The girl on the airplane engine dressed in a '60s outfit complete with flowered cowgirl hat looks like a young Jackie Kennedy, the closest thing we ever had to royalty in America. She was the style maven back then (with her Marilyn Monroe voice), but she was always a lady and, like Diana, loved the colorful hats. They could make or break the outfit!
This was more like a romp through Europe than an "advance." After all, we're not talking war here. How about the movies? The 'Brave New World of Manhattan" of the Twenties was the model for the super-modernistic film, METROPOLIS, which was filmed in Berlin in 1926. See THE ISLAND for a post-modernistic plan for life in America. 'Metropolis' was a "technical marvel with feet of clay" -- three years in the making saw the end of illusions; no interface between European and American filmmaking.
From the Dresden file: "Nobody was made to go it alone.
Either they marry or a club they join...
Club life is as old as mankind itself
Club life, the dance around the golden calf.
The times have not changed. People have. They still kneel down to the golden calf, and wish they had all the money in the world. But they would not be any happier. They might get a 'high' spending all of that ill-begotten cash, but then when it is gone, they are back to the old 'do-nothing' attitude. Attitudes need to change. Church can help if you will keep your independent spirit and not be led around by the nose.
Chain stores have demolished the art of buying and supplied us and the world with cheap goods, there is no fun in shopping anymore. Where is the glamour of all the beauty in merchandising and the desire to look beautiful. To be beautiful in today's world, besides using lots and lots of makeup (men and women) and dressing in expensive, tasteful clothes, you must have the money for reconstructive surgery to always appear "young." The real young women wear nightware out in public, and have no desire to look glorious and glamorous. They just want to attract the opposite sex. Waiting for the bus at the Mall, I observed some of the young males preening before the half-dressed girls: there was a tatoo man (too many on his arms and legs to count), an ape man (all bent over with a drooling gaping mouth) and a Tarzan (with the long flowing hair in the style of the Tarzan movies.) It was quite a show.
Now sex is a big deal in today's society. You don't have to fall in love and get married to be 'active' and have a family. It is not looked down on in today's society (except for church, perhaps) for this type of bad behavior to constantly be flaunted in today's world. It is the world of America. To be respected for a well-brought-up family is passe. Today, anything goes.
Victoria is a professor of history at Columbia University in New York. She has the European mind set about how things should be and might have been. America will always be different from Europe as we have no royalty here, no special personage to admire and try to emulate. The Pope in in the Vatican. The Queen is in England. Jesus is at the right hand of God. What on earth can we aspire to in a country so full of sin and greed -- not much for the average folks. The rich enjoy their big houses and cars (and vans), vacations, cruises, trips overseas; while the rest of us are struggling just to get through one day at a time. The vastness of different lifestyles here will be our undoing. Europe has the edge there. Everyone knows his or her place in the society in which they live.
Book Description
Written by a diverse group of scholars who bring their regional expertise together, this unique and comprehensive text uses organization as a key tool to help students appreciate this important period in global history. Its clear prose weaves basic factual information and analysis to create a ‘student-friendly' text while still allowing for professors' personal interpretation. An introductory chapter introduces five key topics or themes whose influence on the various developments and events in the twentieth century are chronologically discussed throughout the text. More analysis, less detail and refined prose combine with new and retained features to make the 6th edition of 'The Twentieth Century: A Brief Global History' a best selling text for the 20th Century World course.
Customer Reviews:
Good book.......2006-11-23
I bought this book for a college course and ended up reading almost all of it. It presents the subject matter very well and is well-written. I don't even really like History all that much and this book had me reading it.
Average customer rating:
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Twentieth-Century British Political Facts, 1900-2000 (British Political Facts, 1900-)
David Butler , and
Gareth Butler
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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ASIN: 031222947X |
Book Description
Twentieth-Century British Political Facts is the definitive record of the who, the what and the when of British political history in the 1900s, providing reliable information which could not otherwise be found without many hours of digging in a library. Refined and updated since the seventh edition, this unique work has become as standard reference book for scholars, journalists, politicians, civil servants, students and all readers with an interest in political history.
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The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century
Gary Cross , and
John K. Walton
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830
ASIN: 0231127243 |
Book Description
During the first part of the twentieth century thousands of working-class New Yorkers flocked to Coney Island in search of a release from their workaday lives and the values of bourgeois society. On the other side of the Atlantic, British workers headed off to the beach resort of Blackpool for entertainment and relaxation. However, by the middle of the century, a new type of park began to emerge, providing well-ordered, squeaky-clean, and carefully orchestrated corporate entertainment. Contrasting the experiences of Coney Island and Blackpool with those of Disneyland and Beamish, Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton explore playful crowds and the pursuit of pleasure in the twentieth century to offer a transatlantic perspective on changing ideas about leisure, class, and mass culture.
Blackpool and Coney Island were the definitive playgrounds of the industrial working class. Teeming crowds partook of a gritty vulgarity that offered a variety of pleasures and thrills from roller coaster rides and freak shows to dance halls and dioramas of exotic locales. Responding to the new money and mobility of the working class, the purveyors of Coney Island and Blackpool offered the playful crowd an "industrial saturnalia."Cross and Walton capture the sights and sounds of Blackpool and Coney Island and consider how these "Sodoms by the sea" flouted the social and cultural status quo. The authors also examine the resorts' very different fates as Coney Island has now become a mere shadow of its former self while Blackpool continues to lure visitors and offer new attractions.
The authors also explore the experiences offered at Disneyland and Beamish, a heritage park that celebrates Britain's industrial and social history. While both parks borrowed elements from their predecessors, they also adapted to the longings and concerns of postwar consumer culture. Appealing to middle-class families, Disney provided crowds a chance to indulge in child-like innocence and a nostalgia for a simpler time. At Beamish, crowds gathered to find an escape from the fragmented and hedonistic life of modern society in a reconstructed realm of the past where local traditions and nature prevail.
Book Description
Michael Hogan shows how The Marshall Plan was more than an effort to put American aid behind the economic reconstruction of Europe. American officials hoped to refashion Western Europe into a smaller version of the integrated single-market and mixed capitalist economy that existed in the United States. Professor Hogan's emphasis on integration is part of a major reinterpretation that sees the Marshall Plan as an extension of American domestic and foreign-policy developments stretching back through the interwar period to the Progressive Era. Michael Hogan is Professor of History at Ohio State University and editor of Diplomatic History.
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Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Relations (Contemporary History in Context)
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 033380404X |
Book Description
New research by several leading political historians creates a detailed study of Anglo-American relations in the 20th century. Declassified documents provide a unique insight into the personal relationships between Eisenhower and Eden, and Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson. This volume offers a breadth of scholarship drawn from three continents and examines the diplomatic negotiations, powerful personalities, and political considerations at the heart of British-American affairs.
Book Description
Debating the Origins of the Cold War examines the coming of the Cold War through Americans' and Russians' contrasting perspectives and actions. In two engaging essays, the authors demonstrate that a huge gap existed between the democratic, capitalist, and global vision of the post-World War II peace that most Americans believed in and the dictatorial, xenophobic, and regional approach that characterized Soviet policies.
Customer Reviews:
dissecting both sides .......2006-07-05
Who could have imagined in the depths of the Cold War that one day it would be over, and Americans and Russians might debate how it began in a book like this one? As the 20th century slowly passes into history, the book is timely. Containing analysis of important surviving persons and actions in that war. Aided by the ending of the war and the freer exchange of ideas and historical documents.
The book allows for a dispassionate dissection of the perceptions and actions of both sides. You can clearly see what we now know to be misperceptions, and how these were acted on.
Book Description
A rousing history of Ireland in its most tumultous century by one of the most well-known and beloved Irish writers of our time.
Tim Pat Coogan's Ireland in the Twentieth Century will be a must-read for his legion of fans and anyone interested in Ireland's path through the twentieth century. Encompassing the violent and bloody days of the early twentieth century and peopled with such characters as Michael Collins, Eamon DeValera and James Joyce, this promises to be one of the most popular histories of Ireland yet written. Bringing the story up to the present day, Ireland in the Twentieth Century will become, like Coogan's The IRA and The Troubles, standard bearers in the canon of Irish history.
Customer Reviews:
Very Informative.......2007-08-05
If you're looking for a comprehensive history of modern Ireland: you've found it! Coogan is thoroughly knowledgeable in this area and any reader who makes it through the book leaves with concrete answers to much of Ireland's modern history. However, Coogan is also a rather tedious writer and the massive book can be a lot to swallow. Incredibly informative but I do suggest digesting the book in bite size pieces!
Complete (modern) history of Ireland to 2003.......2004-07-01
A thorough, highly detailed account of the current history of Ireland, especially political. While an extremely long book (750+ pages not counting indices) and you have to get used to Coogan's writing style that no sentence shall be less than 50 words long with multiple phrases embedded), this is an excellent account of the evolution of modern day Ireland. Coogan knows the internal political scene well and gives considerable weight to detailing it. This tends to take away somewhat from the readability since as a North American, I'm not familiar with the multitude of names that I'm sure are second nature to an Irishman like Coogan. Nevertheless, I feel that I came away with a better understand of how the Irish situation has developed and it did give me new and better background in which to frame my thinking. Recommended reading but only for true, non-fiction, history buffs.
Complete (modern) history of Ireland to 2003.......2004-07-01
A thorough, highly detailed account of the current history of Ireland, especially political. An extremely long book (750+ pages not counting indices) and you have to get used to Coogan's writing style that no sentence shall be less than 50 words long with multiple phrases embedded. This is an excellent account of the evolution of modern day Ireland. Coogan knows the internal political scene well and gives considerable weight to detailing it. This tends to take away somewhat from the readability since as a North American, I'm not familiar with the multitude of names that I'm sure are second nature to an Irishman like Coogan. Nevertheless, I feel that I came away with a better understand of how the Irish situation has developed and it did give me new and better background in which to frame my thinking. Recommended reading but only for true, non-fiction, history buffs.
Book Description
The contributors to this volume are concerned with the patterns of continuity and change in industrial labor conflicts in major industrialized countries before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The articles have been conceived as part of a series of efforts to assist the further development of comparative labor history, and in particular the application of quantitative techniques to the analysis of industrial labor conflicts in comparative perspective.
Books:
- Global order: Values and power in international politics
- Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography (Anchor Books)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
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