ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an overview of the material and market context of Gilded Age consumption. In addition to reviewing key macro demographic and economic highlights, it traces institutional developments in consumer marketing, department stores, five-and-ten cent stores, direct mail catalogs and distribution, chromolithographic printing, national magazines, and modern packaging that affected many aspects of consumption. The chapter focuses on the long-standing cultural threads of refinement and patriotism expressed through consumption, and then introduces the important topic of consumer brands and branding. The gender section reviews female agency through new shopping environments and new products (e.g., the bicycle), and then strings a new thread, men's consumption and how it may have been shaped in part as compensation to real and perceived threats to male social status and masculinity. The threads of resistance will recount some of the critiques of leisure class excess and will introduce and explicate an important new term: to boycott.
