Celebrating the Family or Tracking Americas Economy

Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals

Author: Elizabeth H Pleck

Nostalgia for the imagined warm family gatherings of yesteryear has colored our understanding of family celebrations. Elizabeth Pleck examines family traditions over two centuries and finds a complicated process of change in the way Americans have celebrated holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year, and Passover as well as the life cycle rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. By the early nineteenth century carnivalesque celebrations outside the home were becoming sentimental occasions that used consumer culture and displays of status and wealth to celebrate the idea of home and family. The 1960s saw the full emergence of a postsentimental approach to holiday celebration, which takes place outside as often as inside the home, and recognizes changes in the family and women's roles, as well as the growth of ethnic group consciousness.

This multicultural, comparative history of American family celebration, rich in detail and spiced with telling anecdotes and illustrations and a keen sense of irony, offers insight into the significance of ethnicity and consumer culture in shaping what people regard as the most memorable moments of family life.

Library Journal

This work is the fascinating history of the changes in holiday customs in our multi-cultural, socially, economically, and technologically evolving American environment over (roughly) the past two centuries. "In colonial America, derived from the Protestant Reformation," holidays and festivals spawned carnivalesque, often bawdy group celebrations. Over time, with the rise of a middle class, these gradually evolved into family-based and family-oriented, sentimentalized ceremonies with ritual in both religious and secular contexts. Later, as a multicultural America and its institutions wrestled with gender and ethnic identity and equity issues, the potent growth of a strongly consumer-oriented economy generated further changes. Conspicuous commercialism came to overshadow reverence and sentiment, as decor, gifts, flowers, and message cards became raisons d' tre at ceremonies in the current postsentimental culture. Pleck (history, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) sees an eclectic American society that is still in flux and continuing to shape and reshape the social content of our myriad and various celebrations. Strongly recommended for academic and public audiences.--Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology (Emerita), Alfred Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
1	Festivals, Rites, and Presents	1
2	Family, Feast, and Football	21
3	Holiday Blues and Pfeffernusse	43
4	Easter Breads and Bunnies	73
5	Festival of Freedom	95
6	Eating and Explosives	117
7	Cakes and Candles	141
8	Rites of Passage	162
9	Please Omit Flowers	184
10	The Bride Once Wore Black	207
11	Rituals, Families, and Identities	233
	Notes	251
	Index	325

Look this: Leadership Agility or Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder

Tracking America's Economy

Author: Norman Frumkin

The book provides a pragmatic approach for viewing the domestic and international dimensions of the ever-new economic landscape of the United States, for gauging its strengths and weaknesses, and for anticipating where it is headed. This edition broadens the focus of the earlier ones. The previous editions highlighted the use of several economic indicators in measuring and evaluating business cycles and economic growth, employment, inflation, and finance. In contrast, the current volume emphasizes broad economic topics, each of which includes several economic indicators used in quantifying and analyzing the overall topic. For example, the chapter on economic growth encompasses the gross domestic product as the basic measure of economic growth, the sources of economic growth, and a technique for anticipating when economic growth will turn negative into a cyclical recession. Thus, this edition shows more of the interrelationships that drive the American economy.

This new Third Edition includes:
-- New framework for macroeconomic analysis, policies, and forecasting;
-- Expanded analyses of economic growth;
-- Expanded analyses of inflation;
-- Expanded conceptual and statistical aspects of economic indicators.

Data and analyses are updated through the first quarter of 1997.

Library Journal

Every day, government and private sources make a bewildering array of data available on GNP, industrial production, capacity utilization, money supply, productivity, and CPI. Most people do not understand what these indicators signify nor how they relate to each other, and textbooks usually deal with these concepts only in passing. Frumkin explains in lay language the main characteristics of the indicators and their uses. His book is jargon-free and serves as a good introduction to a complex subject. Recommended for academic and public libraries. M. Balachandran, Univ. of Illinois Lib., Urbana-Champaign

Booknews

A textbook describing a pragmatic approach for viewing the domestic and international dimensions of the ever-changing economic landscape of the US, for gauging its strengths and weaknesses, and for anticipating where it is headed. No dates are noted for earlier editions, but the third changes the basic organization from specific economic indicators to broad topics that encompass several indicators used to quantify and analyze the overall topic. It also includes statistics up to the first quarter of 1997. Methodology and interpretation are both emphasized, and the treatment is intended to be for readers with no special training in economics as well as for economists. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

Written in everyday language, and suitable for classroom use, self- study or reference, Frumkin's popular classic helps students and the general public interpret trends in the major statistical indicators of the US economy. The second edition updates, refines, and augments the analyses and discussions of the first edition (1987). Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What People Are Saying

Joseph W. Duncan
This book is must reading for economist and non-economist.