Lawrence B. Glickman

Lawrence B. Glickman 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 recently published two books, 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), explores the history of cultural history in the United States, examines recent trends, and develops new agendas. Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America traces changes and continuities in this long-lasting but relatively unexamined American political tradition of boycotting and buycotting.

I am also continuing research a number of topics including trans-Atlantic radicalism in the nineteenth century, sports radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s, and the transformation of American liberalism from the 1870s through the 1940s. I am also continuing to chart the “cultural turn” in U.S. history as well as the history of consumer politics.