The Uncertainty of Everyday Life: 1915-1945 (Everyday Life in America Series)

The Uncertainty of Everyday Life: 1915-1945 (Everyday Life in America Series)

A chronicle of American life between the two world wars examines the impact of change on daily life, covering such topics as factory, farm, and house work; receation; sports; movies; radio; carnivals; medicine; health; food supplies; and more The author, chief historian at the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, finds that technological innovation transformed the nation in the 1915-45 period, leading to a growing personal uncertainty in Americans' lives. New methods of production increased consumption; under-consumption and selective prosperity, he argues, led to the Depression. Advertisers worked to persuade consumers that newly created social ills could be cured, but only by using a certain product. Advances in electrical appliances promised the housewife more freedom, but scientific studies questioned the foods she served her family. Green has filled his exceptionally readable work with the minutiae of everyday life, from frozen foods to Superman comics, using these material things to illuminate broader aspects of American culture. This fifth volume in the series will be useful to social and cultural historians. - Deborah Hammer, Queens Borough P.L., New York Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Excellent fifth volume in the Everyday Life in America series (Victorian America, by Thomas J. Schlereth, 1991, etc.). Green (History/Northeastern Univ.; The Light of the Home, 1983, etc.) digs into the Crash and the rise of FDR; types of employment; houses and homes in suburb, city, and on the farm; mating, and bearing and raising children; aging and dying; religion; food and cooking; radio, movies, and reading; and leisure time and sports. Despite the new social freedom of the Jazz Age, he says, for farmers, facing falling farm prices, ``the sound of the Roaring Twenties was the howl of the wolf at the door.'' From Emily Post's Etiquette (1915) through Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1935), Americans were flooded with guides to behavior and personality growth, while the KKK and bigotry got a massive boost from D.W. Griffith's epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). White-collar jobs grew vastly and WW II allowed women into factories, briefly, and into noncombat military service. Food preparation and storage brought new items to store shelves (factory-made biscuits, quick cereals, frozen foods), while city folk thought bland white bread ``more consistent in texture and easier to store than `immigrant' fare,'' though no foreign-born woman ``would be caught dead with store bread.'' An electrical revolution in household appliances exploded with vacuum cleaners, sewing machines, washing machines, and refrigerators--though most urban homes still had ice delivered until after WW II. Green's liveliest point is that, ``by affirming a special sanitized vision of their nation as a chosen people in a chosen land, Americans unwittingly set a standard for behavior that the people of the present could not attain....'' They assumed that ``history would stop.'' Very special, perhaps the most vital book in this valuable series. (Forty pages of b&w photos--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.