I am a cultural historian of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States with wide-ranging interests in the histories of consumer culture; food and alcoholic beverages; capitalism and the senses; and childhood, gender, and the family. My research focuses on cultural reinvention. It seeks to understand how goods and practices that were previously regarded as illicit or disreputable achieved mainstream acceptance. My first book, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (2004), examines how an array of actors—from advertisers and children’s magazine publishers to child experts, parents, thrift educators, and children themselves—helped to shape the contours of modern consumer society and legitimize a distinctive children’s consumer culture.

My new book, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition, asks a deceptively simple question: how did how alcoholic beverages, previously banned under Prohibition, shed their stigmatized pasts and become widely accepted as ordinary, respectable pleasures? Focusing on the Great Depression and World War II, the book shows how alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the importance of pleasure in modern American life.  As Intoxicating Pleasures reveals, the massive advertising and public relations campaigns launched by industry trade associations played a pivotal role in alcohol’s cultural reinvention, but so, too, did the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel, who pressed the wartime state to provide equitable access to alcoholic beverages.

• Catalina Biesman-Simons
• Sarah Dunne
• Makoto Hunter
• Nicole de Silva

• United States History, Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• Consumer Culture
• History of Food
• History of Alcohol and Drugs
• Gender History
• History of Families and Childhood
• Popular Culture
• Oral History

Tough Sells and Acquired Tastes: Alcohol Marketing in the Mad Men Era and Beyond (in progress)

• Intoxicating Pleasures: Reinventing Wine, Beer, and Spirits after Prohibition (University of California Press, October 2024)
• “Altered States and Gustatory Taste: The Sensory Synergies of Whiskey Marketing in the Mid-Twentieth Century United States,” 73-94, in Capitalism and the Senses, edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
• Capitalism’s Hidden Worlds, edited by Ken Lipartito and Lisa Jacobson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
• “Will It Be Wine or Cocktails? The Quest to Build a Mass Market for California Wine after Prohibition” Enterprise and Society 18 (June 2017): 360-399.
• “Navigating the Boundaries of Respectability and Desire: Seagram’s Advertising and the Muddled Meanings of Moderation after Repeal”
  Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26 (Summer 2012)
• “Beer Goes to War: The Politics of Beer Promotion and Production in the Second World War”
  Food, Culture, and Society 12 (September 2009): 275-312.
• Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: Historical Essays and Documents (edited book)
  Praeger Publishers, 2008. Contributed chapters on “Advertising, Mass Merchandising, and the Creation of Children’s Consumer Culture,” and “Parents and Children in the Consumer Household.”
• Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century
  Columbia University Press, 2004; paperback issued 2005.
• “Manly Boys and Enterprising Dreamers: Business Ideology and the Construction of the Boy Consumer, 1910-1930”
  Enterprise and Society 2 (June 2001): 225-258.
• “Revitalizing the American Home: Children’s Leisure and the Revaluation of Play, 1920-1940”
  Journal of Social History 30 (Spring 1997): 581-596.

• History 9: Historical Methods (Recent Topics: Prohibition and Its Legacies)
• History 17B: The American People: Sectional Crisis through Progressivism
• History 175A: American Cultural History 1830-1920
• History 175B: American Cultural History 1920s-1970s
• History 175D: History of Families and Children in the United States
• History 193F: Food in World History
• History 175R: Research Seminar, American Consumer Culture,
• History 176R: Research Seminar, History of Drugs and Alcohol
• History 201AM: Advanced American Historical Literature (Recent topics: Consumer Culture, Cultural Approaches to the History of Capitalism, History of American Families)
• History 201OH: Oral History Methods and Theory
• History 275A/275B: Research Seminar in American Cultural History
• History 292B: Historiography of the United States, 1840s-1919

• Liaison Committee, Business History Conference, 2018-2021
• Nominating Committee, Business History Conference, 2013-2014
• Steering Board, Food and the Body Multicampus Research Program, University of California, 2012
• Member, Board of Trustees, Business History Conference, 2008-2011
• Associate Editor, Enterprise and Society, 2007-2011
• Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, 2004-2011
• Reviews Editor, The Public Historian, 2004-2006