DCC Speaker Explores How Consumerism Shaped American History and Culture

Release Date April 6, 2007

Poughkeepsie, NY – Dutchess Community College explores how consumerism shaped American history and culture with Depression and War as the Crucible of the Postwar Consumers’ Republic, a lecture by Lizabeth Cohen, Ph.D., on Wednesday, April 18, at 7:00 p.m. in James and Betty Hall Theatre, Dutchess Hall at the main campus in Poughkeepsie. The program, part of DCC’s Lyceum Series, is sponsored by the Handel Family Endowed Faculty Chair and the Dutchess Community College Student Government Association. Admission is free. For information, call the Office of Student Activities at (845) 431-8050 or Professor Seemi Ahmad at (845) 431-8517 or email mail her at ahmad@sunydutchess.edu.

The lecture is based on Cohen’s new history book, A Consumers’ Republic, which tracks the evolution of the marketplace and the consumer through the latter half of the 20th century. The marketplace provided an alternative history of postwar American politics that recognized the importance of everyday economic activity for shaping the destinies of women, African Americans, suburbanites, senior citizens, and many others. Cohen analyzes everyday American behaviors such as shopping, applying for credit, and grassroots consumer activism rather than those events typically designated as “politics.” It is not only a history of consumers, but also a women's history, an African American history, and a history of her native New Jersey, the basis for many of her local examples through which she tests her larger national theses.

Cohen starts her story in the 1930s, when the new phenomenon of mass consumption and the economic conditions of the Great Depression led to the rise of a mass consumer movement closely associated with the New Deal programs. She demonstrates how World War II provided another unique set of conditions that laid the groundwork for the postwar consumers’ republic when Americans learned they could support the war on the home front by obeying price, rent, and rationing regulations, as well as by recycling, participating in scrap drives, and planting Victory Gardens. She also explores the suburbanization of American and the rise of the shopping mall in the 1950s.

Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and the director of the undergraduate program in the Department of History at Harvard University, and formerly was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University. She earned her A.B. degree from Princeton University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkley. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

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