Abstract
Between the Civil War and the 1920s, a consumer culture emerged which attempted to evade class tension by focusing on contrived racial differences. The vast majority of American-born whites and European immigrants alike embraced the illusion of a classless consumer culture in which opportunity was available to white citizens alone. African Americans were caricatured as being racially unsuited to those citizen privileges in consumption and labor space. Archaeological assemblages from Annapolis, Maryland demonstrate, however, that African-American consumers actively sought the opportunities consumer culture promised and articulated an anti-racist class struggle in consumer space.
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Mullins, P.R. Race and the genteel consumer: Class and African-American consumption, 1850–1930. Hist Arch 33, 22–38 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374278
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374278