A twentieth-century triangle trade: selling black beauty at home and abroad, 1945–1965

This study examines the careers of African American beauty culturists as they worked in the United States, Europe, and Africa between 1945 and 1965. Facing push back at home, African American beauty entrepreneurs frequently sought out international venues that were hospitable and receptive to black Americans in the years following World War II. By strategically using European sites that white Americans regarded as the birthplace of Western fashion and beauty, African American entrepreneurs in the fields of modeling, fashion design, and hair care were able to win accolades and advance their careers. In gaining support abroad, particularly in Europe, these beauty culturists capitalized on their international success to establish, legitimize, and promote their business ventures in the United States. After importing a positive reputation for themselves from Europe to the United States, African American beauty entrepreneurs then exported an image of themselves as the world's premier authorities on black beauty to people of color around the globe as they sold their products and marketed their expertise on the African continent itself. This essay demonstrates the important role that these black female beauty culturists played, both as businesspeople and as race leaders, in their generation's struggle to gain greater respect and opportunity for African Americans both at home and abroad. In doing so it places African American beauty culturists within the framework of transatlantic trade networks, the Black Freedom Movement, Pan-Africanism, and America's Cold War struggle.     

"The Right Man": James A. Jackson and the Origins of U.S. Government Interest in Black Business

Despite the widely held notion that U.S. government assistanceto African American entrepreneurs commenced in the late 1960s,the evidence indicates that government interest in promotingblack business actually began in the 1920s. Beginning with theappointment of James A. Jackson in November 1927, the U.S. CommerceDepartment’s agenda, until the mid-1950s, included "NegroAffairs." Jackson’s actions did not generate the directfinancial assistance to black entrepreneurs associated withsuch later government initiatives as Richard Nixon’s "BlackCapitalism." Nevertheless, Jackson’s pioneering efforts,to provide black businesspeople with useful information, helpedto positively reshape contemporary African American entrepreneurs’beliefs about the role of government in their lives.     

Edith Sparks. Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920

The history of business is an ever expanding topic. Numerousbooks on the role of women in modern American business and onwhy women continue to lag behind men in both earning power andbusiness leadership are available. But, few such studies haveplaced the issue of women in business in a historical context.Edith Spark's Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in SanFrancisco, 1850–1920 is thus both welcome and overdue.Sparks, an assistant professor of history at the University     

The impact of values on the selection of philanthropic clubs by elite African American women: An historical perspective

The purpose of this article is to examine the effect of values on the decision to join voluntary philanthropic associations by a select group of elite African American women. Specifically, the research seeks to understand how values, self-concepts, and learning influence a group of prominent African American women in Atlanta, Georgia, to join clubs or organizations that engage in philanthropic activities aimed at improving the conditions of the Black underclass. The research is presented from an historical perspective, examining the experiences and values instilled in the women by their social institutions. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Get real!: Cultural relevance and resistance to the mediated feminine ideal

As part of a longitudinal study that examines early and late adolescent girls' interpretations of mainstream teen magazines, this research focuses on how the African American audience's interpretive frame enables them to critique and distance themselves from selected aspects of a consumption object with which they regularly engage. The results were drawn from in‐depth interviews with 16 African American girls, ages 13–18, who are regular readers of one of the top three teen titles: Seventeen, YM, or ‘Teen. In this article, consumption is conceptualized not only as purchase, but acceptance of and aspiration to the ideals employed by the beauty industry to sell goods and services, e.g., a thin body type, European‐American facial features, and a preference for a “made‐up” appearance. Conversely, anti‐consumption is rejection, subversion or negotiation of those same ideals, although such critical stances do not preclude voluntary, regular exposure to the texts conveying these ideals. The analysis illustrates the importance of cultural relevance in promoting consumers' aspiration to mediated ideals; in particular, the article explores African American consumers' criticism of Euro‐centric feminine ideals as not real. While White girls actively sought out the magazines' alternate, improved version of reality, African American girls compared the fictional work to their real world experience and not only denied the veracity of the ideal, but preferred their reality to it. As predicted by racial identity theory, most African American girls in this study, particularly older girls, did not defer to the magazines' authority in defining their conception of femininity, which instead was strongly influenced by culture and frequently defined in direct opposition to the mediated ideal. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Skin Tones in Magazine Advertising

Abstract

Although African Americans enjoy greater quantitative representation in American advertising than ever before, it is questionable if this representation is a true picture of African Americans. Because of the “what is beautiful is good” syndrome in advertising, advertisers have been criticized by some groups for using models who may present body images and facial features considered too idealistic. These unrealistic portrayals of attractiveness and beauty “likely reflect involuntary responses to subconscious cultural constraints” (Strutton and Lumpkin, 1993, p. 509). Thus a “myth of beauty” that generally favors Eurocentric features such as light-colored skin, narrow noses and thin lips is perpetuated. The exception to this rule, however, may be found in the use of Black athletes as spokespersons and models. To determine if there is a difference in the skin tones of models used in sports magazines and fashion magazines, this study is a content analysis of the models used in Sports Illustrated and Vogue. The results indicate that there were significant differences in the skin tones of the models used in these magazines.     

John E. Murray. Origins of American Health Insurance: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds

John E. Murray's Origins of American Health Insurance concernsa little-known precursor to commercial health insurance, the"industrial sickness funds" of the book's subtitle. This well-researchedbook makes a compelling case for the importance of these fundsin shaping the American health insurance system as we know it.Murray argues that the success of sickness funds during theearly twentieth century helps to explain why European-styleuniversal health insurance does not exist in the United States. In 1915, industrial sickness funds     

Michael Redclift. Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste

Chewing gum was foremost an American invention, Michael Redclifttells us in Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste, a brief yetserious and engaging book that details how chewing gum cameto occupy a distinct place in the rise of American consumerism.Perhaps nothing signified the triviality of consumerism as chewinggum. It possessed what Redclift calls an "ephemeral quality,"it was an easily replicable mass product, and provided instantgratification. This ephemerality was complicated by     

Alan Lawson. A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis

The title of Alan Lawson's new book, A Commonwealth of Hope:The New Deal Response to Crisis, arises from his view that thetremendous intellectual and social ferment of the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries had a far more formative influenceon the architects of the 1930s New Deal than has been acknowledged.During the earlier era the term "commonwealth" was used to describe"the ideal American society by those with a hopeful vision ofAmerica's governing prospects" (xi). The bounty produced by     

Sarah Elvins. Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. 222 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1549-2, $42.95 (cloth).

Elvins’s book is part of a growing body of historicalscholarship that interrogates the lived experience of consumersociety in the twentieth-century United States. Beginning whereWilliam Leach’s Land of Desire (1993) left off, Elvinsseeks to complicate "top-down" narratives of the homogenizationof American consumer culture into a national mass market. Takingher cue from Lizabeth Cohen’s early work on consumptionin Chicago, Elvins examines consumption on the local level in     

Richard Abel. Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910-1914

Richard Abel argues that in the period from 1910, when the motionpicture "revolution" succeeded and the American film marketwas emancipated from French domination, to 1914, when foreignfilms were nearly eliminated from the U.S. market, the Americanfilm industry was characterized by widespread experimentationand innovation, especially in the areas of promotion practices,distribution strategies, content refinement, and audience development.Six chapters of Abel's Americanizing the Movies bring to theforeground the battle of     

Women's Magazines: Construction of Identities and Cultural Consumption in Hong Kong

Consumption is an integral part of contemporary capitalistic society. By means of a textual analysis of letters to the editor of a women's magazine in Hong Kong, as well as in-depth interviews with readers and editors, this paper examines how women's cultural consumption creates, constructs and circulates women's identities. Results reveal that the processes of identification can be constructed on three equivalent consumption levels. Firstly, women readers identify certain "imaginary communities" through reading the magazine, and by modeling the behaviors and styles of the communities they feel they are sustaining their relationship with them. Secondly, women identify with an idealized community-constructed beauty and seek to consume products which collectively suggests this idealized beauty for them. Thirdly, women regard the "communities" as providing shelter for rapport and comfort from the emotional and relational problems of real life. In sum, structured identification-consumption has shaped working class women into an identity, which conforms to society's dominant capitalist logic. Despite these findings, however, there are always a few women who attempt to seek alternative lifestyles.     

Steven Deyle. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life

Steven Deyle’s Carry Me Back demolishes the myths of thedomestic slave trade, replacing images of scheming manstealerswith a comprehensive, yet lucid, account of the human traffic.It does even more than this, however. Its subtitle promisesto discuss the role of the domestic slave trade "in Americanlife," and on this the book fully delivers. The first three chapters of Carry Me Back offer a broad narrativeof the rise and demise of the domestic trade. Deyle argues thatthe trade arose in the years following the American     

Henry S. Rowen, Marguerite Gong Hancock, and William F. Miller, editors. Making IT: The Rise of Asia in High Tech

General Electric is an international high-tech icon that beganwith Thomas Edison and the first electrical revolution, andthrived through every one since. Like many global giants, ithas firm American roots. Yet on June 1, 2007, the New York Timescould publish a headline in the business section entitled "ChiefSays G.E. Aims to Match the Growth Pace Set by India." In     

Charles F. McGovern. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890 1945

Charles McGovern's Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship,1890–1945, explains how Americans came to see consumerismas central to their national identity. More specifically, itexamines how two key interest groups—advertisers and consumeractivists—battled over and ultimately helped define thepolitical meaning of consumerism. According to McGovern, in the early twentieth-century, advertisersassumed consumers were "childlike, irrational, ungovernable,and unpredictable" (p.60), and hoped to sway this malleablemass by convincing them of the deeper value of consumerism.To     

Jeffrey M. Hornstein. A Nation of Realtors(R): A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. xi + 252 pp. ISBN 0-8223-3528-X, $79.95 (cloth); 0-8223-3540-9, $22.95 (paper).

For many people who study the culture of American business,a mention of real estate will conjure up Sinclair Lewis’sfictional creation George F. Babbitt, the title character ofthe 1922 novel Babbitt. I was reminded, when reading JeffreyHornstein’s A Nation of Realtors^®, that Lewis at onepoint used a different working title: "Population 300,000."Between these two titles lay the relationship between the characterof the Realtor and the community that the Realtor, and his peers,     

Price V. Fishback et al. Government and the American Economy: A New History

In Government and the American Economy: A New History, a distinguishedpanel of economic historians chronicles and evaluates how governmenthas shaped U.S. economic development and growth from the colonialperiod to the present. The volume is dedicated to Robert Higgs,whose seminal thesis on the growth of government—thatit is a crisis-induced and persistent process—is one ofthe volume's underlying themes (and the subject of Higgs’chapter titled, "The World Wars"). The other is that government     

Paul Mason Fotsch. Watching the Traffic Go By: Transportation and Isolation in Urban America

In this well-meaning but deeply flawed book, Paul Mason Fotschexamines what he calls "narratives that promote a reliance onthe automobile."(2) Fotsch's Watching the Traffic Go By examinesa series of different events, times, and ideas that he claimshave had a hegemonic power in American popular culture. Thisbook draws on the disciplines of cultural studies and history,and closely reads various books, movies, and events. It movesbetween exploring transport systems (particularly the     

Diane C. Vecchio. Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America

In Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrantsin Urban America, Diane C. Vecchio takes on "inherent assumptionsabout Italian culture and male control of women as a paradigmfor understanding Italian women's work and wage-earning experiences"(p.2). Instead, she offers a portrait of working women who areagents in the economic fortunes of their families and the culturalpractices of their communities, making decisions about theiremployment based on local economic conditions and a varietyof additional variables: gender segmentation of the workforce,geographical     

Shop Talk: Liberalism, Consumerism, and the American Revolution

T. H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer PoliticsShaped American Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2004. xviii + 380 pp. ISBN 0-19-506395-3, $30.00. The Marketplace of Revolution is the culmination of more thantwenty years of sustained inquiry by the distinguished earlyAmerican historian T. H. Breen into the economic culture ofcolonial America. Sweeping in scope and magisterial in conception,it sets forth a novel interpretation of the American Revolutionthat is predicated on the assumption that the pursuit of happinessin the eighteenth-century America referred more to the promiseof personal fulfillment than to the promotion of the commongood. In the language of colonial historians, Breen’sAmerican revolutionaries were paragons of ‘bourgeois virtue’rather than ‘civic humanism.’ Breen’s principalhistoriographical foil is Bernard Bailyn and the so-called republicaninterpretation of the American Revolution with which Bailyn