Drawing on a wide range of studies of Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa, the contributions gathered here consider how political history, business history, the history of science, cultural history, gender history, intellectual history, anthropology, and even environmental history can help us decode modern consumer societies.

This volume brings together historians, economists, political scientists, and anthropologists to present a global perspective on the new forms of lending and borrowing that have become a key feature of twentieth-century mass consumer societies, emphasizing comparative and transnational historical perspectives.

This volume serves up a combination of broad questions, theoretical approaches, and manifold case studies to explore how people have sought to understand markets and thereby reduce risk, whether they have approached this challenge with a practical view based on their own business acumen or used the tools of scholarship.

What did the cosmetic practices of middle-class women in the nineteenth century have in common with the repair of men's bodies mutilated in war? What did the New Woman of the Weimar years have to do with the field of social medicine that emerged in the same period? They were all part of a conversation about the cosmetic modification of bodies, a debate shaped by scientific knowledge and normative social models. Conceived as a cultural history, this book examines the history of artificially created beauty in Germany from the late Enlightenment to the early days of National Socialist rule.

Hustlers, small black marketeers, and Allied soldiers exchanging goods in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin after World War II - the story of the German capital's black markets has inspired many writers of different genres. This book combines an in-depth historical analysis of the emergence of illegal trading under Nazi rule during the war with a new interpretation of the development of the two postwar German states. By focusing on the everyday practices of black marketeers and the historical setting they acted in, it explains how the experiences in a city of turmoil helped to shape the...

Feeding ourselves is a universal experience, but we don't all eat the same foods in the same ways or places. In fact, a meal can reveal a lot about the material circumstances and culture of those preparing and eating it. This book tells the story of Italian food in all its geographical, cultural, and social diversity from the nineteenth century to the present. Each chapter centers on an actual meal, reconstructed on the basis of historical documents, literature, the visual arts, mass media, and oral testimony. The resulting picture is often surprising, as we see how food reflects changes in...

Drawing on a wide range of studies of Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa, the contributions gathered here consider how political history, business history, the history of science, cultural history, gender history, intellectual history, anthropology, and even environmental history can help us decode modern consumer societies.

This volume serves up a combination of broad questions, theoretical approaches, and manifold case studies to explore how people have sought to understand markets and thereby reduce risk, whether they have approached this challenge with a practical view based on their own business acumen or used the tools of scholarship.

This volume brings together historians, economists, political scientists, and anthropologists to present a global perspective on the new forms of lending and borrowing that have become a key feature of twentieth-century mass consumer societies, emphasizing comparative and transnational historical perspectives.

What did the cosmetic practices of middle-class women in the nineteenth century have in common with the repair of men's bodies mutilated in war? What did the New Woman of the Weimar years have to do with the field of social medicine that emerged in the same period? They were all part of a conversation about the cosmetic modification of bodies, a debate shaped by scientific knowledge and normative social models. Conceived as a cultural history, this book examines the history of artificially created beauty in Germany from the late Enlightenment to the early days of National Socialist rule.