"We read advertisements...to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready--even eager--to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it", Daniel J. Boorstin
The rise of industrialism in the first half of the nineteenth-century, meant that for the first time goods could be mass-produced. From the small town farmer to the city dweller, consumerism became an obsession. The beginning of advertising agencies by the late nineteenth-century meant that this new profession would present their message in a way to influence the consumer. Advertising has transformed the American economy, society and culture.
The following websites provide primary materials for the study of consumer culture:
