Overview

The Industrial Revolution was previously understood as having awakened an enormous, unquenchable thirst for material consumption. People up and down the social order had discovered and were indulging in the most extraordinary passion for consumer merchandise in quantities and varieties that had been unimaginable to their parents and grandparents. It was indeed a revolution, but a consumer revolution at the start. In Face Value, Cary Carson expands and updates his groundbreaking earlier work to address the intriguing question of how Americans became the world’s consummate consumers. Prior to the rise of gentry culture in eighteenth-century North America, there was still a decided sameness to people’s material lives. About mid-century, though, a lust for fancy goods, coupled with social aspiration, began to transform American society. Carson here addresses the intriguing question of how Americans developed the reputation for avid consumption. Both elegantly written and engagingly argued, the book reveals how the rise of the gentry culture in eighteenth-century North America gave rise to a consumer economy.

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9780813939377

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Reviews

Face Value is a coda to a career, building on and synthesizing the innovative interpretations which are the hallmark of all of Cary Carson's thinking and writing. This book will fundamentally change material culture scholarship. It challenges the way social, cultural, and economic historians think about consumer behavior in early America and will quickly become the book that everyone interested in the meaning of everyday things must read to participate in the lively discussions that will follow its publication--Carter L. Hudgins, Director, Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, Clemson University

Author Information

Cary Carson, retired Vice President of the Research Division at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, is coeditor with Carl Lounsbury of The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg and editor of Becoming Americans: Our Struggle to Be Both Free and Equal.

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