A study of the emergence of mass consumption and modern advertising in the early twentieth century and of the capitalistic use of advertising as a mechanism to define and control social values and the character of daily life

Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture

Business & Money

Ewen, Stuart

Marketing & Sales

McGraw=Hill

A provocative, compelling, and entertaining look at how the power of images dominates every aspect of our lives.

All Consuming Images

History

Basic Books

All Consuming Images: The Politics Of Style In Contemporary Culture

Captains of Consciousness offers a historical look at the origins of the advertising industry and consumer society at the turn of the twentieth century. For this new edition Stuart Ewen, one of our foremost interpreters of popular culture, has written a new preface that considers the continuing influence of advertising and commercialism in contemporary life. Not limiting his critique strictly to consumers and the advertising culture that serves them, he provides a fascinating history of the ways in which business has refined its search for new consumers by ingratiating itself into Americans' everyday lives. A timely and still-fascinating critique of life in a consumer culture.

Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, 25th Anniversary Edition

Traces the history of public relations as a tool born during the Industrial Revolution to counter the attacks by muckrakers, and examines how it has been used throughout American history by large corporations to manipulate public opinion

PR!: A Social History of Spin

Industries

The early years of the twentieth century were a difficult period for Big Business. Corporate monopolies, the brutal exploitation of labor, and unscrupulous business practices were the target of blistering attacks from a muckraking press and an increasingly resentful public. Corporate giants were no longer able to operate free from the scrutiny of the masses.The crowd is now in the saddle,” warned Ivy Lee, one of America's first corporate public relations men. The people now rule. We have substituted for the divine right of kings, the divine right of the multitude.” Unless corporations developed means for counteracting public disapproval, he cautioned, their future would be in peril. Lee's words heralded the dawn of an era in which corporate image management was to become a paramount feature of American society. Some corporations, such as AT&amp;T, responded inventively to the emergency. Others, like Standard Oil of New Jersey (known today as Exxon), continued to fumble the PR ball for decades. The Age of Public Relations had begun.In this long-awaited, pathbreaking book, Stuart Ewen tells the story of the Age unfolding: the social conditions that brought it about; the ideas that inspired the strategies of public relations specialists; the growing use of images as tools of persuasion; and, finally, the ways that the rise of public relations interacted with the changing dynamics of public life itself. He takes us on a vivid journey into the thinking of PR practitionersfrom Edward Bernays to George Gallupexploring some of the most significant campaigns to mold the public mind, and revealing disturbing trends that have persisted to the present day. Using previously confidential sources, and with the aid of dozens of illustrations from the past hundred years, Ewen sheds unsparing light on the contours and contradictions of American democracy on the threshold of a new millennium.

PR! - A Social History of Spin

The Sonoran Desert of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico sizzles in the sun. Daytime temperatures commonly soar above [actual symbol not reproducible]. The parched, mineral earth gets less than three inches of rainfall a year on average; some years, none at all. Plants of the region even drop their leaves to hold each precious drop of moisture. Yet this desert is one of the most fascinating and beautiful places in North America. A large variety of plants - creosote bush, the fabled boojum and numerous other cacti and succulents - flourish here, as do a wealth of birds, insects, and small mammals. Man is an uneasy resident, however, and although modern cities such as Phoenix and Tucson use artificial water supplies and air-conditioning to survive on its fringes, the natural heart of the desert still rejects all but the most intrepid sojourners. Two who know this desert well are Jack Dykinga and Charles Bowden. Each has confronted it on foot over the course of many years. Bowden, who now lives in Tucson, recently said, "I go to it like a thirsty animal goes to water. Something happens when you walk for a hundred miles in the desert and don't see a footprint. Once I turned around and saw someone else's footprint and it really shook me up. Then I realized it was my own." No casual visitor, Bowden expresses his feelings and experiences in words. He looks not only down at his own footprints, but also back in the historical record - to the Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, to an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest who cast for souls for seventeen years in Baja California. He recalls a Sand Papago Indian shaman who knows the desert like a medicine chest and plans to live forever; and he affectionately remembers both the madness and the sanity of his late friend, desert lover, and fellow pleader for preservation, Edward Abbey. Dykinga recaptures for us the way the desert looks and feels in exquisite color photographs. He has walked and sweated and camped the length and breadth of this place and brought back hundreds of brilliant large-format camera views. More than 120 are preserved here - most never before published. Interwoven together, the personal visions of these two remarkable observers evoke the Sonoran Desert with extraordinary power. We may or may not wish to be in the desert as they have been, but in these pages we will come as close as it is possible to being there.

Channels Of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness

Ewen, Elizabeth

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Typecasting chronicles the emergence of the "science of first impression" and reveals how the work of its creators—early social scientists—continues to shape how we see the world and to inform our most fundamental and unconscious judgments of beauty, humanity, and degeneracy. In this groundbreaking exploration of the growth of stereotyping amidst the rise of modern society, authors Ewen &amp; Ewen demonstrate "typecasting" as a persistent cultural practice. Drawing on fields as diverse as history, pop culture, racial science, and film, and including over one hundred images, many published here for the first time, the authors present a vivid portrait of stereotyping as it was forged by colonialism, industrialization, mass media, urban life, and the global economy.

Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Seven Stories Press

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