ABSTRACT
The social transition we have been discussing occurred in North America and the more industrialized parts of Europe in the 1920s. Frederick Lewis Allen provides a finely detailed retrospective of it for the United States in his famous bestseller, Only Yesterday (1931). The opening chapter contrasts the beginning and end of the decade as reflected in the life of an ordinary citizen. Almost every detail would later be recognized as a landmark event in the constitution of a consumer society. New forms of popular entertainment, new vehicles of mass communication, and new consumer products of immense popularity were being stitched together to form a new popular culture, a rich and coherent network of symbolic representations and behavioral cues, to replace the older cultures then fading away.
