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This article presents information on the book "An All Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America," by author Gary Cross. The author is a professor at Penn State University and a pioneering and prolific historian of Europe and America, which has explored the social, cultural and political dimensions of consumption before. This book is the best survey yet written of the history of modem American consumer society. Much more than a summary of recent scholarship although it performs this task admirably, it is an informed, balanced, thoughtful and surprisingly passionate meditation on the making and meaning of society.

THE WAGES OF WHITENESS: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. By David R. Roediger. Verso. 191 pp. $54.95. Paper $16.95. While it has become commonplace for progressives [...]

This article presents information on the book "The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class," by David R. Roediger. Roediger's exciting new book, "The Wages of Whiteness," makes people understand what it means to see oneself as white in a new way. According to Roediger, in the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, working-class whites tried to strengthen their tenuous grip on freedom, independence and modernity by representing African-Americans as not only incapable of achieving them but as symbolizing their opposite. Thus, the emerging political ideology of white workers--in short, the making of the white working class-was inextricably tied to the debasement of black culture.