256 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / 17 halftones
Business / Media Studies & Journalism
In mid-twentieth-century America, mass tourism became emblematic of the expanding horizons associated with an affluent, industrial society. Nowhere was the image of leisurely travel more visible than in the parade of glossy articles and advertisements that beckoned readers from the pages of popular magazines. In Richard K. Popp’s The Holiday Makers, the magazine industry serves as a window into postwar media and consumer society, showing how the dynamics of market research and commercial print culture helped shape ideas about place, mobility, and leisure.
Richard K. Popp is assistant professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
“A delightful read...Popp has a gift for expressing ideas and for threading important theoretical perspectives into the discourse without losing readers.”—Journal of American History
“The Holiday Makers...serves as a model of how well a mix of government statistics, consumer magazine articles on a single topic or trend, advertising trade magazine articles, and careful reading in twentieth-century history of the United States can...illustrate the importance of print media to cultural transformation.”—Journalism History
“The Holiday Makers is a very insightful and well-researched study of the age of mass tourism in postwar America. In addition to addressing a gap in the scholarship on consumer culture history, it fits into an emerging literature on how Americans were taught to 'see' the world in particular ways during the cold war era.”—Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly
“Popp weaves a must read that aids our understanding of commercially made American culture, and the rise and fall of the American vacation.”—American Historical Review
“As an interdisciplinary study, The Holiday Makers is successful in incorporating a range of relevant literatures, including critical theory, cultural history, tourism, marketing, and consumer culture. . . . A valuable book that contributes to the development of national identity, mass market, and the business of travel.”—Business History Review
“The author is elevating tourism from merely ‘leisure time’ and illuminating it as a powerful tool of political propaganda and effective instrument for relieving social, political and economic tensions.”—Journal of Cultural Geography
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