Research

Research Interests

Consumer Culture; Material Culture; Persuasion; Visual Culture; Underground and Secondhand Economies; Capitalism; Fake News and Information Warfare; Humbuggery and Bullshit

 

Select Articles and Chapters

“Itinerant and Informal Distribution,” in eds. Mary S. Zboray and Ronald J. Zboray, The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: U.S. Popular Print Culture to 1860 (Oxford University Press [UK], 2019).

 

“Fence-ing Lessons: The Commodification of Scrap in the Long 19th Century,” Business History special issue, Changing Secondhand Economies 61.1 (February, 2019).

 

“The Rise of the Consumer in the Age of Jackson,” in The Blackwell Companion to Andrew Jackson, ed. Sean P. Adams (Blackwell Publishing, 2013).

 

“Wishful Thinking: Retail Premiums in Mid-19th-Century America,” Enterprise & Society (December, 2012).

 

“The Persuaders: Early American Advertisers and Marketers,” Ephemera Journal (September, 2012).

 

“In Hock: Pawning in Early America,” Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2007).

 

Book Reviews

City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture by Justin Clark, and The Finest Building in America: The New York Crystal Palace, 1853-1858 by Edwin G. Burrows, Journal of the Early Republic (Winter, 2019).

 

Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America by Cary Carson, Journal of Social History (February, 2018).

 

For a Short Time Only: Itinerants and the Resurgence of Popular Culture in Early America by Peter Benes, New England Quarterly (March, 2017).

 

Sweet Stuff: An American History of Sweeteners from Sugar to Sucralose by Deborah Jean Warner, Business History Review (Summer, 2013).

 

A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America by David Jaffee, Journal of the Early Republic (Summer, 2011).

 

Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic by Susan Branson and The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in the Journal of the Early Republic (Fall, 2009).