Today's guest is Lizabeth Cohen, the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University. We discuss her classic work A Consumers Republic: The Politics of Consumption in Postwar America, which argues that in post-war America, the act of consuming was seen as a virtuous contribution to the public good. But the model had inherent limits in the race, gender, and class dynamics of the era, especially visible in housing, suburbanization, and the...
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