American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998

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Description

The dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that have fueled the growth of consumer culture in the US would appear to have little place in the history of Mississippi–a state long associated with poverty, inequality, and rural life. But as Ted Ownby demonstrates on this innovative study, consumer goods and shopping have played vital roles in the development of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum era to the present.

After examining the general and plantation stores of the nineteenth century, a period when shopping habits were stratified in line with racial and class hierarchies, Ownby traces the development of new forms of stores and buying patterns in the twentieth century, when women and African Americans started to wield new kinds of economic power. The use of sources as diverse as store ledgers, blues lyrics, and the writings of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and Will Percy, he illuminates the changing relationships among race, rural life, and consumer goods and, in the process, offers a new way to take note the connection between power and culture in the American South.

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