Final Exam Questions

Choose two of the following four questions. Write 4 double-spaced pages answering each of the two chosen questions (8 pages total). Use examples from materials you read and viewed to support your argument. Try to use 2-3 brief examples to support each point you make. Do not use footnotes but include the author, title of the book, article, or other source, and page number if you quote from or refer to these sources.

1. William Leach argues in his article on department stores that the emergence of advertising and consumer culture created new, more active, social roles for women and contributed to the advancement of women’s rights, particularly in the case of women’s suffrage. Do you agree with this argument? Did consumer culture more often advance or hurt women's social standing in different periods in American history? Use at least two different examples (for example, departments stores in the 1920s and malls and public space in the 1950s, or television advertisements in the 1990s) to answer this question.

2. Originally, historians have placed the beginning of consumer culture in the late nineteenth century with the development of industrial society and mass markets. More recently, however, such historians as T. H. Breen and James Axtell have argued that consumer culture developed as early as Revolutionary and Colonial America, respectively. What are the major arguments in favor of this position? Do you think Breen and Axtell prove their case? Why? Use class readings on early America and on U.S. consumer culture in 1890-1930 to answer this question.

3. Lawrence Glickman listed "organized non-consumption" among several key issues in the history of consumer culture (p. 13). To what extent the decision not to consume had been an effective political act in American history? What cultural, economic, and political conditions contributed to successful boycotts during the American Revolution and in Depression era Harlem? What role consumption played in the way Americans expressed their national and racial identity in these two cases?

4. In the end of 1941 film Sullivan's Travels the protagonist proclaims that during economic crisis ordinary people need comedy and escape rather than realistic depiction of social problems. Did this film, and mass culture in twentieth-century America in general, mainly reflect the views of its audiences or the views of companies that produced it? How did advertising, consumer culture, and corporate ownership affect the content and social role of mass media? In answering this question, you can use such examples as mass culture and the working class in the 1920s, black popular music in the 1950s and 1960s, and news media in the 1990s.

Exams are due on July 28 by 8 AM.
in the History Department, Robinson B 359, in my mailbox.