When I was in grad school, my advisor referred to Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal as the most important work of American social history published in the 1990s. I just finished her long-awaited second book A Consumer's Republic, and this one might be better than the first. It was written to a wider audience, I believe, and I hope it finds that audience.
Cohen's premise is that the post-WWII period can be fruitfully reconsidered by examining the history of consumption and consumer movements in this period. She describes two kinds of consumer-based citizenship--one in which consumers actively fight for their rights in the marketplace, and a more passive kind in which consumption in and of itself is good citizenship because it helps the nation grow. The former is the more radical possibility, and while it gained widespread acceptance during the Depression and WWII, and has occasionally made headway since, the latter ideal has truly won out over most of the past 50 years, and particularly the critical 1945-75 period.
Cohen's book looks at a wide variety of phenomena in light of this notion of consumer history and America as a "Consumer Republic": suburbanization, target marketing, unequal school funding, and most stimulatingly the civil rights movement. Cohen shows that African-Americans used the consumer ideology and the idea of an open market as a wedge into freeing up places of consumption--think, for instance, about department stores and lunch counters as the sites of important sit-ins--an important battle given the increasing folding together of the ideas of "citizen" and "consumer". Conversely, suburbanization and the development of suburban shopping center tended to reinscribe segregation--either explicitly or only somewhat indirectly, as the presence of minorities in a neighborhood (regardless of their wealth or social status) led to both perceived and real declines in property values. The federal government was complicit in this until the practice of "redlining" neighborhoods was outlawed in the late '60s; by then, however, patterns were already established that would be difficult to overcome.
This book is not without some minor faults. While it admirably blows apart received wisdom that the story post-war history is national and state and localities don't matter, her focus on Northern New Jersey for the local parts of the story is limiting. (She does note that this region was more prototypical than typical.) For instance, at one point she mentions that some of the suburban tract land used to be farmland; beyond that brief comment, however, this is the story exclusively of urban vs. suburban America, with rural America nowhere to be found. (This is, sadly, not unusual in American historiography.) Also, the extent to which the patterns of the Northeast matched those of the South, Midwest, and West is left an open question. Finally, while this book seemlessly integrates race, gender, and class analysis--not as afterthoughts or narrow perspectives but as fundamental to the story--it is a little too comfortable with equating "race" to "African-American" and only passingly discusses other minorities or the importance of "whiteness" studies.
Regardless, I recommend this book highly to historians and others alike. For historians, this has the feel of a major, field-shifting book. For non-historians, this book is an excellent example of the best work historians do. It is almost wholly jargon-free, and the debates of narrow scholarly interest are largely relegated to the footnotes. Also, it shows how historians can view and reinterpret events through a new lens. Some may call this "revisionism", but this is not the type of book people who use that label as a smear have in mind. This is not a "victim" book or a whiny tract, but a nuanced, well-argued, and well-written book (better edited than her brilliant but at times confusing first book) that can't help but be influential in academic circles, and from which progressive activists will also benefit if it crosses over to a mainstream audience.
