The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life in America

The study of daily life is a fairly new type of history. Readers can find plenty of books on high politics and diplomacy but the history of the kitchen has not been written about much. Yet it can tell us a lot: it reveals changing patterns of consumption, the availability of servants, nutritional levels, domestic technology. My own copy of the Montgomery Ward catalogue for 1895 contains a lot of raw social history: feminists have argued that women's underwear tells us a something about women's roles; “smokers' requisites” points to a common if not quite universal habit one hundred years...