Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960

Richard Harris

elo 2012 · University of Chicago Press

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A unique study of how the American Dream came to be—and came to be constantly updated and renovated: ”A pleasure to read.”—American Historical Review

Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, magazines, cable shows, and home improvement stores.
 
Building a Market charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s—and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself.
 
Deeply insightful, Building a Market is the carefully crafted history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well.
“An important topic that deserves to be widely read by scholars of business history, urban history, and social history.”—Journal of American History

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Richard Harris is professor of geography at McMaster University. He is the author of Unplanned Suburbs:Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900–1950 and Creeping Conformity: How Canada Become Suburban, 1900–1960.