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.

From submarines to the suburbs—the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh’s eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world’s leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. In Nuclear Suburbs, Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers. Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh’s suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh’s elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city. Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the “renewal” of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice.

Media depictions of community are enormously influential on wider popular opinion about how people would like to live. In this study, Rowley examines depictions of ideal communities in Hollywood films and television and explores the implications of attempts to build real-world counterparts to such imagined places.

For the last 150 years, advertising has created a consumer culture in the United States, shaping every facet of American life—from what we eat and drink to the clothes we wear and the cars we drive. In the United States, advertising has carved out an essential place in American culture, and advertising messages undoubtedly play a significant role in determining how people interpret the world around them. This three-volume set examines the myriad ways that advertising has influenced many aspects of 20th-century American society, such as popular culture, politics, and the economy. Advertising not only played a critical role in selling goods to an eager public, but it also served to establish the now world-renowned consumer culture of our country and fuel the notion of "the American dream." The collection spotlights the most important advertising campaigns, brands, and companies in American history, from the late 1800s to modern day. Each fact-driven essay provides insight and in-depth analysis that general readers will find fascinating as well as historical details and contextual nuance students and researchers will greatly appreciate. These volumes demonstrate why advertising is absolutely necessary, not only for companies behind the messaging, but also in defining what it means to be an American.

Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls—these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postwar years, examining their design, use, and representation. By drawing on a wealth of examples ranging from the built environment to popular culture and film, Andrea Vesentini shows how suburban interiors were devised as a continuous cultural landscape of interconnected and self-sufficient escape capsules. The relocation of most everyday practices into indoor spaces has often been overlooked by suburban historiography; Indoor America uncovers this latent history and contrasts it with the dominant reading of suburbanization as pursuit of open space. Americans did not just flee the city by getting out of it—they did so also by getting inside. Vesentini chronicles this inner-directed flight by describing three separate stages. The encapsulation of the automobile fostered the nuclear segregation of the family from the social fabric and served as a blueprint for all other interiors. Introverted design increasingly turned the focus of the house inward. Finally, through interiorization, the exterior was incorporated into the all-encompassing interior landscape of enclosed malls and projects for indoor cities. In a journey that features tailfin cars and World’s Fair model homes, Richard Neutra’s glass walls and sitcom picture windows, Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center and the Minnesota Experimental City, Indoor America takes the reader into the heart and viscera of America’s urban sprawl.

Advertising at War challenges the notion that advertising disappeared as a political issue in the United States in 1938 with the passage of the Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act, the result of more than a decade of campaigning to regulate the advertising industry. Inger L. Stole suggests that the war experience, even more than the legislative battles of the 1930s, defined the role of advertising in U.S. postwar political economy and the nation's cultural firmament. She argues that Washington and Madison Avenue were soon working in tandem with the creation of the Advertising Council in 1942, a joint effort established by the Office of War Information, the Association of National Advertisers, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Using archival sources, newspapers accounts, and trade publications, Stole demonstrates that the war elevated and magnified the seeming contradictions of advertising and allowed critics of these practices one final opportunity to corral and regulate the institution of advertising. Exploring how New Dealers and consumer advocates such as the Consumers Union battled the advertising industry, Advertising at War traces the debate over two basic policy questions: whether advertising should continue to be a tax-deductible business expense during the war, and whether the government should require effective standards and labeling for consumer products, which would render most advertising irrelevant. Ultimately the postwar climate of political intolerance and reverence for free enterprise quashed critical investigations into the advertising industry. While advertising could be criticized or lampooned, the institution itself became inviolable.

Offers a detailed cultural history of weddings in America from 1945 to 2000, exploring the political, social, economic, and demographic events that influenced the traditions and cost associated with weddings in the post-war years.