Forever immortalized in the television series Mad Men, the mid-twentieth century marketing world influenced nearly every aspect of American culture--music, literature, politics, economics, consumerism, race relations, gender, and more. In Engineered to Sell, Jan Logemann traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research and commercial design who transformed capitalism, from the 1930s through the 1960s. He argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of...

Forever immortalized in the television series Mad Men, the mid-twentieth century marketing world influenced nearly every aspect of American culture--music, literature, politics, economics, consumerism, race relations, gender, and more. In Engineered to Sell, Jan Logemann traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research and commercial design who transformed capitalism, from the 1930s through the 1960s. He argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of...