This book is an unorthodox biography of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Lord Leverhulme (1851-1925), the founder of the Lever Brothers’ Sunlight Soap empire. Unlike previous biographies, which have focused on the man’s life story and eccentricities, or just considered one aspect of his career, So clean places him squarely in his social and cultural context and is fully informed by recent historical scholarship. Much more than a warts-and-all biography, the book uses Lever as an entry-point for contextualized and comparative essays on the history of advertising; on factory paternalism, town planning, the Garden City movement and their ramifications across the twentieth century; and on colonialism and forced labour in the Belgian Congo and the South Pacific. It concludes with a discussion of his extraordinary attempt, in his final years, to transform crofting and fishing in the Outer Hebrides. Written in an engaging and accessible style, So Clean will appeal to academics and students working in business, social, cultural and imperial history.

Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who heralded a radical change in American culture and launched the first truly modern decade. The New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Flapper is an inside look at the 1920s. With tales of Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form; Lois Long, the woman who christened herself “Lipstick” and gave New Yorker readers a thrilling entrée into Manhattan’s extravagant Jazz Age nightlife; three of America’s first celebrities: Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks; Dallas-born fashion artist Gordon Conway; Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and spectacular fall embodied the glamour and excess of the era; and more, this is the story of America’s first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness. Whisking us from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be flappers begged their mothers for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where patrons partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the 1920s to exhilarating life.

A spirited chronicle of the West's ambivalent relationship with dirt The question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with confidence. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and perhaps going so far as to dip your hands in some water. Did Napoleon know something we didn't when he wrote Josephine "I will return in five days. Stop washing"? And why is the German term Warmduscher—a man who washes in warm or hot water—invariably a slight against his masculinity? Katherine Ashenburg takes on such fascinating questions as these in Dirt on Clean, her charming tour of attitudes to hygiene through time. What could be more routine than taking up soap and water and washing yourself? And yet cleanliness, or the lack of it, is intimately connected to ideas as large as spirituality and sexuality, and historical events that include plagues, the Civil War, and the discovery of germs. An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, Dirt on Clean considers the bizarre prescriptions of history's doctors, the hygienic peccadilloes of great authors, and the historic twists and turns that have brought us to a place Ashenburg considers hedonistic yet oversanitized.

Using documentary evidence in the form of numerous advertisements of the time, From Submarines to Suburbs is a fascinating analysis of the way corporations made the successful switch from supporting the war effort to building on the peacetime prosperity by re-tooling the patriotic fervor of the home front.

The victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been home to the most aggressive and thoughtful critics of consumption such as Puritanism and Prohibition. This work offers a history of how market forces came to dominate American life.

Modern advertising has changed dramatically since the early twentieth century, but when it comes to food, Katherine Parkin writes, the message has remained consistent. Advertisers have historically promoted food in distinctly gendered terms, returning repeatedly to themes that associated shopping and cooking with women. Foremost among them was that, regardless of the actual work involved, women should serve food to demonstrate love for their families. In identifying shopping and cooking as an expression of love, ads helped to both establish and reinforce the belief that kitchen work was women's work, even as women's participation in the labor force dramatically increased. Alternately flattering her skills as a homemaker and preying on her insecurities, advertisers suggested that using their products would give a woman irresistible sexual allure, a happy marriage, and healthy children. Ads also promised that by buying and making the right foods, a woman could help her family achieve social status, maintain its racial or ethnic identity, and assimilate into the American mainstream. Advertisers clung tenaciously to this paradigm throughout great upheavals in the patterns of American work, diet, and gender roles. To discover why, Food Is Love draws on thousands of ads that appeared in the most popular magazines of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Ebony, and the Saturday Evening Post. The book also cites the records of one of the nation's preeminent advertising firms, as well as the motivational research advertisers utilized to reach their customers.

This ten-volume encyclopedia explores the social history of 20th-century America in rich, authoritative detail, decade by decade, through the eyes of its everyday citizens. Social History of the United States is a cornerstone reference that tells the story of 20th-century America, examining the interplay of policies, events, and everyday life in each decade of the 1900s with unmatched authority, clarity, and insight. Spanning ten volumes and featuring the work of some of the foremost social historians working today, Social History of the United States bridges the gap between 20th-century history as it played out on the grand stage and history as it affected—and was affected by—citizens at the grassroots level. Covering each decade in a separate volume, this exhaustive work draws on the most compelling scholarship to identify important themes and institutions, explore daily life and working conditions across the economic spectrum, and examine all aspects of the American experience from a citizen's-eye view. Casting the spotlight on those whom history often leaves in the dark, Social History of the United States is an essential addition to any library collection.