I apologize for what may be the results of a tryptophan hangover, but I’d like to turn my disgust over Black Friday into a potentially useful discussion. The blogosphere has been filled with dozens of smart, helpful discussions of the history of Thanksgiving, but observers of popular culture, or at least popular media, might get the impression that Black Friday is actually this week’s larger, more important holiday. My television, email, and even twitter account have been inundated with commands to shop.
Our teaching philosophies include commitments to help students develop critical thinking skills, enabling them to understand their world in its historical context. How then can American history help us contextualize this quintessentially American “holiday?”
Being a critical thinker today requires having a critical awareness of the ways in which global capitalism and contemporary consumerism shape our lives. Recent trends in historiography fortunately have much to offer. I emphasize the consumer revolution of the early eighteenth century in my survey course, and again in the early twentieth century, but I wonder if I might further highlight this theme in future terms. Consumerism extends across American history. Once again, I have more questions than answers.
I have my students read Richard Hakluyt’s justification for colonization, a document which appeals directly to the mercantilist values of early modern England. My students have been so thoroughly shaped by consumer capitalism (these students spend the first week of each semester “shopping” for classes, after all). Without more explicit framing, I fear that my students may not understand the difference between a mercantilist consciousness and a contemporary consumer capitalist consciousness. Or are we better off highlighting the similarities rather than the differences between these paradigms, thus demonstrating the continuities between the early modern world and our own?
The market revolution of the early nineteenth century receives heavy treatment in my class, but my discussion of advances in transportation, communication, and the beginning of industrialization rarely explores the ways in which these developments contributed to a consumerist consciousness. In a friendly but heated discussion with one of my brightest students, we evaluated whether the turn toward the market economy in China and the corresponding developing of a consuming middle class would inexorably lead to democratic reforms. He was optimistic, I was more guarded. These ideas exist in popular discourse, however, so perhaps it would be worthwhile to explore the relationship between the market revolution and Jacksonian democracy. Sean Willentz has much to teach us here. I will be revisiting both Chants Democratic and The Rise of American Democracy. What else should I add to my reading list as I consider the relationship between Jacksonian democracy and the market revolution?
Where else might I better integrate the history of consumerism in the history of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries?
