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

The dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that have fueled the growth of consumer culture in the United States would seem to have little place in the history of Mississippi--a state long associated with poverty, inequality, and rural life. But as Ted Ownby demonstrates in this innovative study, consumer goods and shopping have played important 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 according to racial and class hierarchies, Ownby traces the development of new types of stores and buying patterns in the twentieth century, when women and African Americans began to wield new forms of economic power. Using 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 understand the connection between power and culture in the American South.

Author: Ted Ownby
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 05/31/1999
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.14w x 0.71d
ISBN: 9780807848067

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 05/01/1999 pg. 1564
Library Journal 05/01/1999

About the Author
Ownby, Ted: - Ted Ownby is associate professor of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi. He is author of Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865.