Here is the Dodge Ram ad with a different part of King’s “The Drum Major Instinct” as the narration: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_v1h6Zoi-Q&w=560&h=315] “I’ve got to drive this car…”...
consumerism
“The Drum Major Instinct”
In case you missed it last night, Dodge (the automobile manufacturer) ran a Super Bowl ad using Martin Luther King’s 1968 sermon “The Drum Major Instinct” to sell trucks. (The sermon was preached on February 4, 2018). Here is the...
“Consuming Religion”
This is the title of Religious Studies scholar Kathryn Lofton‘s new book. Over at Religion Dispatches, she answers a ten questions about it. Here is a taste: What’s the most important take-home message for readers? First, nobody evades being organized...
“Inconspicuous Consumption”
Is Thorsten Veblen’s category “conspicuous consumption” still useful in an age when consumerism has become so democratized? Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, the James Urban Chair of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Southern California, believes we have moved from an...
What is “Late Capitalism?”
If “late capitalism” is what Annie Lowrey describes in this piece at The Atlantic, I don’t think I am in favor of it. A taste: A job advertisement celebrating sleep deprivation? That’s late capitalism. Free-wheeling Coachella outfits that somehow all...
What is More Important: Quality Consumer Goods or Social Equality?
The obvious answer is quality consumer goods. How could we live without them? At least this is how Pennsylvania steel magnate Andrew Carnegie would have answered the question posed in the title of my post. Yesterday in my Pennsylvania History class...
The Author's Corner with Jennifer Van Horn
Jennifer Van Horn is Assistant Professor of Art History and History at the University of Delaware. This interview is based on her new book, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017). JF:...
The Author's Corner with Joanna Cohen
Joanna Cohen is a lecturer in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London. This interview is based on her new book, Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America (Penn Press, 2017). JF: What led you...
Early African Americans and Consumerism
Over at the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, Jared Hardesty of Western Washington University has a fascinating post about how the eighteenth-century consumer revolution influenced African Americans in Boston. Hardesty is the author of Unfreedom:: Slavery and Dependence...
Why Did the KKK Hate J.C. Penney's?
Cara Giaimo explains at Slate: In 1930, E.D. Rivers—state senator, gubernatorial candidate, and Great Titan of the Ku Klux Klan—stood up in front of his constituents in Clarke County, Georgia, and made an impassioned speech. “For the first time in the...
Pope Francis Continues to Defy Political Categories
Back in September when Pope Francis visited the United States I wrote a piece for Fox News titled “Pope Francis is neither liberal nor conservative, Democrat or Republican. He is a Catholic.” Here is a taste of what I argued:...
Super Bowl Commercials and the American Revolution
Andy Schocket, a history professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and the author of Fighting Over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution, is a true historical thinker. He even thinks historically when watching the Super Bowl! Over...
George Scialabba on Christopher Lasch and the Family
Cultural critic George Scialabba revisits Christopher Lasch’s 1977 book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged and tries to rescue Lasch’s argument from the feminists who bashed the book when it first appeared. Sciaballa writes at The Baffler: It was not […]
The Dark Side of Free Markets
Over at The Conversation, Yale University economist Robert Shiller and Georgetown University economist George Akerlof argue that free market capitalism preys on human weakness and exploits it for economic gain. According to Shiller and Akerloff, the authors of a new...
Gary Cross on Nostalgia
Some of you may recall our recent Author’s Corner interview with Gary Cross, author of Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism.Over at History News Network, Cross reflects on how consumerism and nostalgia for the commodities of the...
The Diderot Effect
Denis Diderot About ten years ago I taught a course on the history of American consumerism. It was a fun course to teach and I read a lot of scholarship on the subject. For various reasons I never taught the […]
The Author’s Corner with Gary S. Cross
Gary S. Cross is Distinguished Professor of Modern History at Pennsylvania State University. This interview is based on his new book Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2015). JF: What led you to write Consumed Nostalgia?...
Image of the Day: Jesus Promise Seeds
My colleague Devin Manzullo-Thomas recently taped this package to my office door. I hope to bring it to my history of American evangelicalism class this week as an example of the kind of Christian kitsch that evangelicalism produces. I am […]
Jerry Seinfeld Accepts His Clio and Rips the Advertising Industry
Hilarious [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHWX4pG0FNY]
Pope Francis on the Culture of Waste
An excerpt from his book The Church of Mercy: A Vision for the Church posted at the Washington Post “On Faith” blog. It is no longer the person who commands, but money, money, cash commands. And God our Father gave us...