A01=Wendy A. Woloson
academic
Age Group_Uncategorized
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america
american
anti semitic
archival
Author_Wendy A. Woloson
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business
capitalism
capitalist
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBTB
Category=KCZ
Category=KFFL
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
COP=United States
correspondence
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
economics
economy
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
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era
finance
financial
Format=BB
Format_Hardback
great depression
historical
history
household
income
independence
Language_English
PA=Contact supplier
pawn shop
pawnbroking
pawning
poor
poverty
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
scholarly
softlaunch
stereotypes
textbook
time period
united states
usa
wages
wealth
worker
working
workplace
Product details
- ISBN 9780226905679
- Format: Hardback
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 30 Apr 2010
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Puncturing the myth of the seamy storefront stocked with stolen watches and overseen by a shifty proprietor, "In Hock" reveals that pawnshops have long played an integral role in Americans' economic lives. The definitive history of pawn-broking in the United States from the nation's founding through the Great Depression, this volume demonstrates that the practice was inextricably intertwined with the rise of capitalism. The class of working poor begotten by this economic tide could make ends meet, Wendy A. Woloson argues, only by regularly visiting pawnshops to supplement their inadequate wages. Nonetheless, businessmen, reformers, and cultural critics berated the shops for promoting vice and used anti-Semitic stereotypes to cast their proprietors as greedy and cold-hearted. Parsing and subverting these caricatures, Woloson shows that pawnbrokers were in fact shrewd businessmen, often from humble origins, who honed sophisticated knowledge of a wide range of goods and their values in different markets.
In the process, she paints a resonant portrait of the generations of Americans whose struggle for economic survival often depended on an institution that has remained, until now, woefully misunderstood.
Wendy A. Woloson is an independent scholar and consulting historian living in Philadelphia. She is the author of Refined Tastes: Sugar, Consumers, and Confectionery in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.
