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Events
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
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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McComb, Mary C. "Great Depression and the Middle Class: Experts, Collegiate Youth and Business Ideology," American Studies, George Washington University, January 2004.
This dissertation examines how middle-class expert authors and collegiate youths collaboratively constructed a discourse that furnished them with the means to organize themselves around a shared sense of middle-class identity during the Great Depression. Many Historians have contended that discourse in America took a leftward turn during the economically turbulent 1930s and that Americans embraced the rhetoric of the labor movement. I argue that college students and experts adopted the language of the marketplace, the logic of capitalism, and the process of self-commoditization to make sense of their situation and to erect social barriers to protect their shared middle-class status. In the 1930s the material conditions of the American working class inspired them to band together to demand their rights as laborers. Similarly, the material circumstances of the middle class sparked a conservative effort to consolidate and preserve the privileges that had been passed down from previous generations. Using expert-authored texts, mass-marketed advice manuals, and newspapers from five colleges and universities I elucidate how students and experts engaged in a process of middle-class retrenchment by utilizing concepts of business, capitalism, commodities and advertising to develop an inclusive middle-class identity that defined boundaries and kept Others out. Undergraduates looked to experts for advice on how to further their social interests, raise their caches of symbolic capital, shape themselves into desirable commodities, and move themselves - much like merchandise - into symbolic marketplaces.
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