More Work For Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan.
In the context of a social history of housework, Cowan writes a superb history of the adoption of mass-produced goods and appliances in U.S. households. Many surprising and revealing stories on why our daily lives are organized the way they are. Cowan's survey, A Social History of American Technology is also worth reading but it's broader and more uneven. Good history of the early radio industry.

Electrifying America, David Nye.
History of the adoption and social meanings of electricity in the U.S.
Template for the adoption patterns and cultural understanding of the internet. Nye believes that culture has a strong impact on the way that technologies are absorbed into society. Also by David Nye: Consuming Power and American Technological Sublime.

Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865-1920, James Norris (out of print).
Excellent, well-written history about the co-evolution of mass production, mass media, and advertising. Better history than some of the other, more highly ideological and impressionistic books in the category.

Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, William Leach.
On the origins of merchandising in the US, 1880s-1920s, along with the institutions that arose to support the mass market, including fashion, investment banking, and philosophic schools of positive thinking. Great history, eccentric neopuritan analysis - he basically believes that mass culture represented a decline from a society of disciplined, devout puritans to a society of infantile hedonists. He doesn't take into account that in EuroAmerican culture the wealthy always had access to personal service and attractive things - the industrial revolution made these things available to a wider number of people.

Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, David Nasaw.
Chronicles the rise of public entertainment at the turn of the century: vaudeville, World Fairs, amusement parks, dance halls, movie palaces. Nasaw draws a vivid picture of the scene, with a sense of populist fun - contrast this with William Leach's sense of puritanical disdain, and his lurid depiction of the siren call of department stores. Nasaw places the colorful scenes in a cultural framework - the push toward "respectibility" that meant edging out the prostitution, alcohol, and gambling that characterized earlier public entertainment, as well as the exclusion and mockery of blacks that helped to give the diverse newly-urban and newly-American crowds a sense of shared identity.

The book explains the origins of some cultural species whose descendents live today - amusement parks, movies - as well as extinct species - like dime museums, vaudeville, nickelodeons. One insight - which is sort of obvious but I hadn't thought of it before - is that today's amusement parks are designed mostly for children - the World's Fairs and Coney Islands were for adults. This book is an excellent complement to "Electrifying America," in which David Nye tells some of the same stories from the economic and social history of the adoption of electricity.

Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Lawrence Levine.
An important yet frustrating book. Agrues that the forms we know as "high culture" were socially constructed in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Levine shows how Shakespeare, opera, and, to a lesser extent symphonic music, were truly part of popular culture in the early-to-mid 19th century. Shakespeare plays shared the same playbill with animal acts and acrobats; audiences responded with cheers, jeers and sometimes riots; producers felt free to adapt and rearrange plays and music to suit their needs. Later in the 19th and early in the 20th centuries, these art forms came to be categorized as "high art", treated as sacred texts, separated from other categories of "low" or "popular" culture, performed for wealthy audiences, for high ticket prices, in single-purpose temples, with great and snooty decorum.

Yet the book is far weaker than it could be. Levine barely takes into account the great shifts in the economy, and the shifts in U.S. class structure that prompted people to canonize high culture at the time. A new professional middle class was forming - engineers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, academics - who gained their status through education and work - and needed to distinguish themselves from the working class. Symphonies and museums gave the rich a way to feel socially responsible without caring about the poor, and gave the nouveau-bourgeouis a way to assert that their education rendered them culturally superior. (see Ohmann)

Levine relies heavily on accounts of art institutions, performers, and leaders to make his case. He brings much less evidence about the ways that audiences changed their perceptions of performances. This weakness is striking compared to Nasaw's book - Nasaw is excellent at bringing evidence from letters, journals, fiction, journalism - as evidence of people's experience of public culture. Levine also isn't that good at intellectual history. Levine quotes some of the cultural critics who developed theories of "high art." But he doesn't put those theories into the art-historical context that a reasonably attentive English major could summarize.

While the book is flawed, it's worth reading. In some ways, I think, the choices framed then still shape our cultural world, in obedience or rebellion.

Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, Roland Marchand.
The book seems to be well-known; interesting background on the development of the social identity of advertisers and the social biases of ads. His argument depends on what seems to me to be a highly debatable concept of "modernity," and his source material is primarily ads - he draws facile connections between advertising and social trends that he doesn't support with information about how people absorbed the advertising message.

Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn of the Century, Richard Ohmann.
Marxist history of advertising. The Marxist perspective can be refreshing - he deals with the evolution of the class structure head-on. This seems to me to be a central theme that many of the other writers duck. His discussion of the evolution of the professional-managerial class is extremely interesting - and my favorite part of the book. But his Marxist theory is often stronger than his history.

Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, Susan Strasser
Interesting history of brands; shallower and not as well-written as some of the other books.

Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Gournal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture, Jennifer Scanlon
Analyzes a key chapter in the evolution of consumer culture: the role of the Ladies' Home Journal in the formation of middle-class women's identity. Interesting history on the women in the advertising and publishing business. It's not that well written, and it reads like a dissertation turned into a book.

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940, Susan Porter Benson
History of department stores, focusing on the women who worked there. Interesting perspectives on class issues, the evolution of salesmanship, the evolution of managerial structures.

America Calling : A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Claude Fischer
The early telephone businessmen misunderstood what the phone would be used for - they thought chatting was a waste of time and they discouraged it. Fischer believes that people use technology as they will, despite the delusions of marketers and advertisers. His view counters prevalent beliefs in technological determinism and marketing supremacy. Cowan's histories of the adoption of vacuum cleaners and washing machines yield a somewhat different story - the way technology is adopted depends on cultural preferences; advertising and marketing also play a key role in constructing consumer desire.

Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States, Vivian Zelizer.
Attempts to explain why the sale of life insurance suddenly took off in the 1840s. She connects this to changing religious ideas about the money, life, and death. Insurance companies were major advertisers then, as now, in magazines targeted at men. I suspect this is related to the changing social construction of mens' identity in industrial/consumer society.

The Professions in American History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch.
Collection of essays on the evolution of higher education, law, medicine, journalism, government, psychology and management. Uneven and shallow.

The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business: Alfred D. Chandler
Classic on the development of hierarchical big-business management.

Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century, Richard Brodhead.
Brodhead examines the writing of Stowe, Hawthorne, Alcott, Jewett, and Chestnutt, in the context of the emerging genres and social frameworks of mid and late-19th century literature. Excellent book - I recommend it highly. Brodhead was one of my teachers at Yale - I was going to take his senior seminar on late 19th/early 20th century American literature, and then he up and got a Guggenheim fellowship to write this very book.