Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920
Histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era tend to characterize the United States as an expansionist nation bent on Americanizing the world without being transformed itself. In Consumers' Imperium, Kristin Hoganson reveals the other half of the story, demonstrating that the years between the Civil War and World War I were marked by heightened consumption of imports and strenuous efforts to appear cosmopolitan.

Hoganson finds evidence of international connections in quintessentially domestic places--American households. She shows that well-to-do white women in this era expressed intense interest in other cultures through imported household objects, fashion, cooking, entertaining, armchair travel clubs, and the immigrant gifts movement. From curtains to clothing, from around-the-world parties to arts and crafts of the homelands exhibits, Hoganson presents a new perspective on the United States in the world by shifting attention from exports to imports, from production to consumption, and from men to women. She makes it clear that globalization did not just happen beyond America's shores, as a result of American military might and industrial power, but that it happened at home, thanks to imports, immigrants, geographical knowledge, and consumer preferences. Here is an international history that begins at home.
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Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920
Histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era tend to characterize the United States as an expansionist nation bent on Americanizing the world without being transformed itself. In Consumers' Imperium, Kristin Hoganson reveals the other half of the story, demonstrating that the years between the Civil War and World War I were marked by heightened consumption of imports and strenuous efforts to appear cosmopolitan.

Hoganson finds evidence of international connections in quintessentially domestic places--American households. She shows that well-to-do white women in this era expressed intense interest in other cultures through imported household objects, fashion, cooking, entertaining, armchair travel clubs, and the immigrant gifts movement. From curtains to clothing, from around-the-world parties to arts and crafts of the homelands exhibits, Hoganson presents a new perspective on the United States in the world by shifting attention from exports to imports, from production to consumption, and from men to women. She makes it clear that globalization did not just happen beyond America's shores, as a result of American military might and industrial power, but that it happened at home, thanks to imports, immigrants, geographical knowledge, and consumer preferences. Here is an international history that begins at home.
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Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920

Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920

by Kristin L. Hoganson
Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920

Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920

by Kristin L. Hoganson

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Overview

Histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era tend to characterize the United States as an expansionist nation bent on Americanizing the world without being transformed itself. In Consumers' Imperium, Kristin Hoganson reveals the other half of the story, demonstrating that the years between the Civil War and World War I were marked by heightened consumption of imports and strenuous efforts to appear cosmopolitan.

Hoganson finds evidence of international connections in quintessentially domestic places--American households. She shows that well-to-do white women in this era expressed intense interest in other cultures through imported household objects, fashion, cooking, entertaining, armchair travel clubs, and the immigrant gifts movement. From curtains to clothing, from around-the-world parties to arts and crafts of the homelands exhibits, Hoganson presents a new perspective on the United States in the world by shifting attention from exports to imports, from production to consumption, and from men to women. She makes it clear that globalization did not just happen beyond America's shores, as a result of American military might and industrial power, but that it happened at home, thanks to imports, immigrants, geographical knowledge, and consumer preferences. Here is an international history that begins at home.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807888889
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 03/15/2010
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 685,349
File size: 8 MB

About the Author

Kristin L. Hoganson is associate professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and author of Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments     xi
Beyond Main Street: Imperial Nightmares and Gopher Prairie Yearnings     1
Cosmopolitan Domesticity, Imperial Accessories: Importing the American Dream     13
The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities of Dress     57
Entertaining Difference: Popular Geography in Various Guises     105
Girdling the Globe: The Fictive Travel Movement and the Rise of the Tourist Mentality     153
Immigrant Gifts, American Appropriations: Progressive Era Pluralism as Imperialist Nostalgia     209
Conclusion: The Global Production of American Domesticity     251
Appendix of Travel Clubs     257
Notes     279
Bibliography     341
Index     389
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