Beyond Walls: Re-inventing the Canada-United States Borderlands

Buying for the Home is a book about the experiences and also the polarities of shopping and the home. It analyses the ways in which the agencies and discourses of the retail environment mesh with the processes of physical and imaginative re-creation that constitute the domestic space, teasing out the negotiations and interactions that mediate this key arena. The study examines how the strategies of retailers were both arbitrated by and negotiated through the actions and desires of the homemaker as consumer. Drawing on the recent CHORD (Centre for the History of Retail and Distribution) colloquium on shopping and the domestic environment and including two specially commissioned pieces, the book draws on a wide selection of interdisciplinary work from established scholars and new researchers. Organised around four key themes - retail arenas and the everyday; identity and lifestyle; fashioning domestic space; and cultural practice - the ten case studies cover a range of cultural encounters and locations from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. Through these interdisciplinary but linked case studies, Buying for the Home forces us to consider the fractured space that existed between the world of goods and the middle- and working class home and in so doing interrogate how middle-class and plebeian homemakers view, imagine and ultimately occupy their domestic spaces in early-modern, modern and post-modern society. Contents: Preface; Introduction: between the shop and the home, David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby; Part 1 Retail Areas and the 'Everyday': Shopping at 1st hand? Mistresses, servants and shopping for the household in early modern England, Claire Walsh; 'To families furnishing kitchens': domestic utensils and their use in the 18th-century home, Karin Dannehl; Guns, horses and stylish waistcoats? Male consumer activity and domestic shopping in 18th and early 19th-century England, David Hussey. Part 2 Shopping for Identities?: Liberty and lifestyle: shopping for art and luxury in 19th-century London, Sonia Ashmore; 'Artistic and commercial' Japan: modernity, authenticity and Japanese leather, Yasuko Suga. Part 3 Fashioning the Domestic: Making and Re-Making the Home through Consumption: A desirable commodity or practical necessity? The sale and consumption of 2nd-hand furniture, 17501900, Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby ; 'A pretty custom' updated: from 'going to housekeeping' to bridal showers in the United States, 1850s1930s, Shirley Teresa Wajda. Part 4 Consumption for the Home as Cultural Practice: The milkman always rang twice: the effects of changed provisioning on Dutch domestic architecture, Irene Cieraad; From Ground Force to garden-making: how ordinary gardeners consume lifestyle aesthetics, Lisa Taylor; Taking a look at the wild side of diy home deacute;cor, Judy Attfield; Index. About the Author: David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby are both based in the Department of History at the University of Wolverhampton.