Building a Market

Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, consumer magazines, a cable television network, and thousands of home improvement stores. "Building a Market" charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s - and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself. Deeply insightful, "Building a Market" is the carefully crafted history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well.

ISBN 0226317668   DEWEY edition DC23 ISBN13 9780226317663 (What's this?)   Pages 472 Publisher The University of Chicago Press   Published in Chicago, IL Imprint University of Chicago Press   Series title Historical Studies of Urban America Format Hardback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 01 Aug 2012   Width (mm) 152 DEWEY 338.4764370970904   Academic level General

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