Review
A thoughtful contribution to understanding the forces that ushered in modern US culture, with all of its opportunities, limitations, and peculiarities.
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Choice 2005)
Moskowitz offers important insights into the development of American middle-class ideals of material comfort, and of an emerging shared national culture.
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History 2005)
An ambitious and far-reaching study with implications for material history, business history, and the study of the middle class in America.
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Enterprise and Society 2006)
Well-researched, well-written, and convincing... Will certainly influence future discussion of the expansion of the middle class and the consumer culture of the early twentieth century.
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Journal of Social History 2005)
The strength of Marina Moskowtiz’s welcome addition to this body of work lies in the author’s choice of particular case studies, through which the book seeks to discover the role of material culture in defining the American middle class at the beginning of the last century.
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Journal of American Studies 2006)
Moskowitz has creatively connected the rise of national culture and middle-class America to the emergence of a generally accepted standard of living.
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Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 2005)
Imaginative, insightful, and lively... required reading for anyone interested in understanding how the United States became the quintessential middle-class nation.
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Michigan Historical Review 2006)
In this well-researched monograph, Marina Moskowitz traces the evolution of the American concept of the standard of living from 1870 to the 1920s through fascinating case studies on silverplate flatware, bathroom fixtures, mail-order homes, and zoning plans.
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American Historical Review 2007)
Moskowitz's well-written and extensively researched book investigates how the concept of the 'standard of living' became the measure of middle-class well-being and the material expression of middle-class identity during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
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Technology and Culture 2006)
Refusing to recognize boundaries between social science and the novel, this innovative history rejects divisions between cultural and business history. Marina Moskowitz probes the 'standard of living' as a liminal aspiration between production and consumption that defined the American 'middle class' through the objects and spaces of the home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Journal of American History 2006)
At first glance, a study that offers in-depth case studies of such items as flatware and zoning plans might not sound like an energizing pageturner. However, Marina Moskowitz's book is both of these things and more. Moskowitz uses the stories of everyday items to craft a persuasive case for the emergence of a new, national standard of living in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America.
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Business History Review 2005)
A compelling argument for the complexity and pervasiveness of a shared fascination with a standard of living.
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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2007)
Exceedingly well-written, clearly organized, and abundantly researched. There is nothing in the scholarly literature quite like this.
(Daniel Horowitz, Smith College )
From the Back Cover
Coined in 1902, the term "standard of living" grew popular in early twentieth-century America. Though its exact definition remained ambiguous, it most often reflected the middle class and its material comfort. The term was not a precise measure of how people lived, but instead embodied the ideal of how middle-class Americans wanted to live. In Standard of Living, Marina Moskowitz explores what material and social components constituted this standard, and who decided what they were and how they were to be promoted.
"Refusing to recognize boundaries between social science and the novel, this innovative history rejects divisions between cultural and business history. Marina Moskowitz probes the 'standard of living' as a liminal aspiration between production and consumption that defined the American 'middle class' through the objects and spaces of the home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."— Journal of American History
"Moskowitz offers important insights into the development of American middle-class ideals of material comfort, and of an emerging shared national culture."— History
"At first glance, a study that offers in-depth case studies of such items as flatware and zoning plans might not sound like an energizing pageturner. However, Marina Moskowitz's book is both of these things and more. Moskowitz uses the stories of everyday items to craft a persuasive case for the emergence of a new, national standard of living in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America."— Business History Review
"A compelling argument for the complexity and pervasiveness of a shared fascination with a standard of living."— Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"Well-researched, well-written, and convincing... Will certainly influence future discussion of the expansion of the middle class and the consumer culture of the early twentieth century."— Journal of Social History
"In this well-researched monograph, Marina Moskowitz traces the evolution of the American concept of the standard of living from 1870 to the 1920s through fascinating case studies on silverplate flatware, bathroom fixtures, mail-order homes, and zoning plans."— American Historical Review
Marina Moskowitz is a reader in history and American Studies at the University of Glasgow.
