The book builds an original argument for the department store as a significant site of design production, and therefore offers an alternative interpretation to the mainstream focus on consumption within retail history. Emily M. Orr presents a fresh perspective on the rise of modern urban consumer culture, of which the department store was a key feature. By investigating the production processes of display as well as fascinating information about display-making's tools and technologies, the skills of the displayman and the meaning and context of design decisions which shaped the final visual effect are revealed. In addition, the book identifies and isolates 'display' as a distinct moment in the life of the commodity, and understands it as an influential channel of mediation in the shopping experience. The assembly and interpretation of a diverse range of previously unexplored primary resources and archives yields fascinating new evidence, showing how display achieved an agency which transformed everyday objects into commodities and made consumers out of passersby.

In this book, Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.

Publisher Description

Michael J. Lisicky is the author of several bestselling books, including Hutzler's: Where Baltimore Shops. In demand as a department store historian, he has given lectures at institutions such as the New York Public Library, the Boston Public Library, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the Milwaukee County Historical Society, the Enoch Pratt Free Library and the Jewish Museum of Maryland. His books have received critical acclaim from the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore City Paper, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Pittsburgh Post Gazette. He has been interviewed by national business periodicals including Fortune Magazine, Investor's Business Daily and Bloomberg Businessweek. His book Gimbels Has It was recommended by National Public Radio's Morning Edition program as "One of the Freshest Reads of 2011." Mr. Lisicky helps run an "Ask the Expert" column with author Jan Whitaker at www.departmentstorehistory.net and resides in Baltimore, where he is an oboist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

The geography of American retail has changed dramatically since the first luxurious department stores sprang up in nineteenth-century cities. Introducing light, color, and music to dry-goods emporia, these "palaces of consumption" transformed mere trade into occasions for pleasure and spectacle. Through the early twentieth century, department stores remained centers of social activity in local communities. But after World War II, suburban growth and the ubiquity of automobiles shifted the seat of economic prosperity to malls and shopping centers. The subsequent rise of discount big-box stores and electronic shopping accelerated the pace at which local department stores were shuttered or absorbed by national chains. But as the outpouring of nostalgia for lost downtown stores and historic shopping districts would indicate, these vibrant social institutions were intimately connected to American political, cultural, and economic identities. The first national study of the department store industry, From Main Street to Mall traces the changing economic and political contexts that transformed the American shopping experience in the twentieth century. With careful attention to small-town stores as well as glamorous landmarks such as Marshall Field's in Chicago and Wanamaker's in Philadelphia, historian Vicki Howard offers a comprehensive account of the uneven trajectory that brought about the loss of locally identified department store firms and the rise of national chains like Macy's and J. C. Penney. She draws on a wealth of primary source evidence to demonstrate how the decisions of consumers, government policy makers, and department store industry leaders culminated in today's Wal-Mart world. Richly illustrated with archival photographs of the nation's beloved downtown business centers, From Main Street to Mall shows that department stores were more than just places to shop.

The department store was brought to its first peak in the middle of the 19th century in Paris. It was seized on and developed as a central feature of American urban life by the pioneers based particularly in Chicago. Subsequently Gordon Selfridge left Chicago to bring the idea to London in the early 20th century. This is a comparative social history of the department store in its manifestations on both sides of the Atlantic over a period of 70 years. It deals at length with the importance of the department store in the history of retailing and with its role in the transformation of urban life, particularly the city centre, the rise of the consumer and the economic and social liberation of women. Bill Lancaster addresses the architecture and technology of the department store and the influences upon its design of new ideas about retailing and new technologies. Also dealt with at length is the change in its customer base - the move from catering merely to upper- and middle-class clientele to temples of mass consumption of the 1900s. Finally the book reviews the development of rivalry in the city centre between department stores, the trends in retailing since the 1930s and the impact of the out-of-town store on the health and appeal of the city-centre department store.