This book explores the history and practice of testimonial advertising in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, addressing a surprising lack of scholarship on this enduring and pervasive marketing tool. Treating consumers as neither the victims nor the empowered foes of corporate practices, the authors gathered here contribute to new scholarship at the intersection of cultural and business history by examining how testimonials mediate negotiations between producers and consumers and shape modern cultural attitudes about social identity, advice, community, celebrity, and the consumption of brand-name goods and services.
Table of Content
Introduction; M.Moskowitz & M.Schweitzer Testimonials in Silk: Juba and the Legitimization of American Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain; S.B.Johnson ‘The Testifying Subject’: Reliability in Nineteenth-Century Marketing, Science, and Law; M.Pettit ‘After a season of war’: Sharing Horticultural Success in the Reconstruction-Ear Landscape; M.Moskowitz ‘The Ten Year Club’: Artificial Limbs and Testimonials in the Early Twentieth Century; E.Slavishak ‘The Mad Search for Beauty’: Actresses, Cosmetics, and the Middle-Class Market; M.Schweitzer ‘I am Kay and I Prefer Modern’: Bridal Testimonials and the Rise of Consumer Rites, 1920s-1950s; V.Howard ‘Dear Friend’: Charles Atlas, American Masculinity, and the Bodybuilding Testimonial, 1894-1944; D.Padurano ‘For Us, By Us’: Hip Hop Fashion, Commodity Blackness and the Culture of Emulation; M.Rizzo
About the author
MARINA MOSKOWITZ
is Director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies and a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Glasgow, UK. MARLIS SCHWEITZER
is an Assistant Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada.
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