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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Queen, Bradley. "Conservatism and the Logic of American Consumer Democracy, 1938-1976," American and New England Studies, Boston University, July 2004.
“Conservatism and the Logic of American Consumer Democracy” places the political economy of consumerism at the center of political change to explain how the conservative foundations of American liberalism stabilized the political economy from the New Deal to the rise of Richard Nixon. By documenting the movement of the consumer interest into national politics and the political economy, its impact on the trajectory of regulatory politics, subsequent changes in legal thought, and the ideological response of the marketing and advertising industry to political and regulatory change, this dissertation offers an historical explanation for the triumph of modern political conservatism. Within the political economy of consumerism - that abstract arena where public and private interests intersected, where consumer interests were cared for by public and private guardians, and where the meaning of regulatory government was debated and shaped - capitalism and democracy folded into each other. Using presidential speeches, archival material, congressional hearings, and legislative histories, the first three chapters document the political value of consumer interest by analyzing the literature of regulatory reform and developments in administrative government. The next chapter uses a corpus of Courts of Appeals and Supreme Court cases to trace the legal history of commercial speech doctrine in explaining the Supreme Court’s decision to partially protect commercial speech from government regulation under the First Amendment in 1976. The last chapter documents developments in marketing and advertising that created a democratic language endowed with enough political value to be considered worthy of protection under the Constitution’s most majestic guarantee.
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