During the first part of the twentieth century thousands of working-class New Yorkers flocked to Coney Island in search of a release from their workaday lives and the values of bourgeois society. On the other side of the Atlantic, British workers headed off to the beach resort of Blackpool for enter[...]

The unqualified victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been the home of the most aggressive and often thoughtful criticism of consumption, including Puritanism, Prohibition, the simplicity movement, the '60s hippies, and the consumer righ[...]

When Gary Cross and his wife learned that their baby son Brad had hemophilia, it seemed like a relatively small bump in the road of their American dream family life. Medicine would make it all manageable. But the Crosses did not know the shots they were giving Brad for his condition carried a deadly[...]