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Financing the American dream : a cultural history of consumer credit

Author: Lendol Glen Calder
Publisher: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1999.
Edition/Format:   Book : EnglishView all editions and formats
Summary:
Calder presents the first book-length social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources - including personal diaries and letters, government and business records,  Read more...
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Details

Material Type: Internet resource
Document Type: Book, Internet Resource
All Authors / Contributors: Lendol Glen Calder
ISBN: 069105827X 9780691058276
OCLC Number: 39464979
Notes: Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Chicago, 1993.
Description: xv, 377 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Contents: Credit, consumer culture, and the American Dream --
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society --
Debt in the Victorian money management ethic --
Small-loan lending and the rise of the personal finance company --
Hard Payments: the rise of installment selling --
From consumptive credit to consumer credit --
Consumer credit in the Great Depression.
Responsibility: Lendol Calder.
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Abstract:

Calder presents the first book-length social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources - including personal diaries and letters, government and business records, newspapers, advertisements, movies, and the words of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and P.T. Barnum - to show that debt has always been with us. He vigorously challenges the idea that consumer credit has eroded traditional values. Instead, he argues, monthly payments have imposed strict, externally reinforced disciplines on consumers, making the culture of consumption less a playground for hedonists than an extension of what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of disciplined rationality and hard work.

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