Teaches post-Civil War American history, with special interests in labor history, cultural history, and the history of consumer society.

Professor Glickman regularly teaches surveys of US History since the Civil War; lecture courses on the United States in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the United States in the Twentieth Century; undergraduate seminars in labor, cultural, and consumer history; as well as a variety of graduate seminars, including one on the comparative history of consumer societies. His first book, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Cornell 1997; paperback, 1999) examine the role that workers played in the development of consumer society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His edited anthology, Consumer Society in American History: A Reader (Cornell 1999) is designed to introduce students to key readings in the field.

Current Activities

I have two books forthcoming, both from the University of Chicago Press. The Cultural Turn in U.S. History is an anthology (co-edited with James Cook and Michael O’ Malley), which explores the history of cultural history in the United States, examines recent trends, and develops new agendas. Buying Power: Consumer Activism in America from the Boston Tea Party to the Twenty-First Century traces changes and continuities in this long-lasting but relatively unexamined American political tradition of boycotting and buycotting. I am also continuing research on trans-Atlantic radicalism in the nineteenth century and various aspects of modern consumer society.

Lawrence B. Glickman