Pamela Walker Laird
Biographic Data
| ID | 682204 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pamela Walker Laird |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pamela Walker |
| FAMILY NAME | Laird |
| SIGNATURE | LAIRD P W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Denver |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle
Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle. By Lukas Rieppel. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 325 pp. $29.95.) Pamela Walker Laird Pamela Walker Laird University of Colorado Denver, Denver, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4,…
Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing
K atherine J. P arkin . Women at the Wheel: A Century of Buying, Driving, and Fixing Cars
As a teenager, I speculated that cars, boats, and other vehicles were tagged with feminine names and pronouns because men entered them and controlled them. Perhaps I was right. Katherine J. Parkin makes a strong case for the dominance of such gendered—even misogynistic—presumptions and meanings within the complex cultures that have revolved around American automobility. Women at the Wheel describes and illustrates countless portrayals of women as…
How business historians can save the world – from the fallacy of self-made success
Narratives about ‘self-made’ success form a pillar of Anglo-American lore, but the concept’s meanings and applications no longer reflect either its origins or how people actually succeed. Ideological competition has reshaped the Calvinists’ admiration for community-serving self-improvement into a Social Darwinian glorification of individual ambition and wealth. American and British business and political leaders now invoke this newer narrative to…
The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture
Whether catchy or mellow, music has helped sell goods and services for millennia. Modern communication intermediaries, such as advertising agents, and the rise of broadcasting expanded commercial music's reach, intensity, and costs into national and international markets. Timothy D. Taylor's The Sounds of Capitalism draws out this twentieth-century story through extensive research in archives, the trade press, interviews, and, yes, the music itse…
Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry (review)
Reviewed by: Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry Pamela Walker Laird (bio) Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry. By Bruce D. Epperson. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2010. Pp. vi+294. $45. The bicycle industry’s flame burned brightly in the late 1800s, and the man most famous for fanning that flame was Albert A. Pope. Bruce D. Epperson spent two decades studying the industry and the man, yet, to his credi…
Bringing in Business History Front and Center
Can your students list more than a few items that they touch, wear, eat, or otherwise use that were not made or sold by someone who intended to make money? Do your students know anyone who wants to earn a salary or a proft from a business? Have your students ever seen an advertisement? The answers are completely obvious. And yet, for all our connections with the world of private enterprise— Americans experience an average of three thousand advert…
Advertising and the Rise of Big Business
Advertising has a long history. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of advertising from ancient Rome and Pompeii in the form of painted signs on the walls of buildings. In the Middle Ages, shopkeepers drew attention with hanging signs that displayed an emblem of their respective trades, while street criers and peddlers promoted their wares with combinations of chants, rhymes, humor, and exaggerated speech (1). Most of us are familiar with the …
Looking Toward the Future: Expanding Connections for Business Historians
Last year, Will Hausman gave us a splendid overview of business history's development for his presidential address. Despite his modesty, he treated us to a review of the parallels between his career and the field's progress, which owes much to his dedication to the Business History Conference (BHC) and its various constituencies. What we have within the BHC now, thanks to Will and many others, are multiple opportunities for exciting interactions …
Putting social capital to work
In arguing for social capital's relevance to business activities, I once set aside day trading – along with outright gambling – as an exception. Day trading's practitioners operate independently of
Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (review)
Reviewed by: Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America Pamela Walker Laird (bio) Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. By Giles Slade . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 330. $27.95. Cultures can achieve affluence either by wanting little and producing little or wanting much and producing much, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins taught us. The strength of Giles Slade's Made to Break as history is its …
Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream (review)
As long as marketers have sought markets, they have subsidized state-of-the-art communication systems for building audiences and projecting their messages. Lawrence R. Samuel provides a lively history of the early decades of one media system, television, emphasizing the reciprocal development of advertising practices and television's capabilities between 1946 and 1964. Fortunately, Samuel assesses advertisements' effectiveness by contemporary dat…
Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey
Journal Article Made in America: Self Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey. By Jeffrey Louis Decker. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. xxx, 170 pp. Cloth, $44.95, ISBN 0-8166-3020-8. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8166-3021-6.) Get access Pamela Walker Laird Pamela Walker Laird University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume…
Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art
Journal Article Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art. By Michele H. Bogart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography. By Patricia Johnston. Berkeley: University of California Press Get access Pamela Walker Laird Pamela Walker Laird University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86…
The Public's Historians
The Public’s Historians Pamela Walker Laird (bio) Students in my public history classes generally start out wondering why the topics extend beyond setting up attractive exhibitions, raising funds, conserving artifacts, and other practical matters. The class readings and discussions steadily draw people to recognizing the relevance of addressing social constructions, rightful ownership of artifacts, diverse voices, and the relative merits of comme…
Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse
Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse by Richard R. John
512 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE gant study of the medieval economy and its complex legacy; hers is an impressive achievement. Elaine Clark Dr. Clark teaches in the Department of History at the University of Michigan— Dearborn. Spreading the News: The American Postal Systemfrom Franklin to Morse. By Richard R. John. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+369; notes, index. $49.95 (cloth). Innovative applications ofold t…
Auto Opium: A Social History of Automobile Design
Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture by Timothy B. Spears
374 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture, By Timothy B. Spears. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp· xx+300; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. How did the products of the Industrial Revolution find their ways into the American heartland? Who carried news of the products and argued on their behalf before national brand advertising took over much of that…
The Car without a Single Weakness: Early Automobile Advertising
Cover Design “THE CAR WITHOUT A SINGLE WEAKNESS”: EARLY AUTOMOBILE ADVERTISING PAMELA WALKER LAIRD And speaking about hills, I want to tell you that the best part of automobiling—that part that gets you harder than anything else—is the way an automobile sweeps uphill. It doesn’t know a hill when it comes to it. A wheelbarrow can run down-hill. . . The auto mobile, however, going down-hill can make old grav itation dizzy, drunk, even with deligh…
Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture
Auto Opium: A Social History of Automobile Design by David Gartman
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 377 xenophobic anxieties and growing sense of nationalism to their need to find comfort in a rapidly changing world by softening the hard edges of technology. Changing and conflicting values inherent in this tension between the old and the new are an underlying theme of the book. As the home eroded as the center of social life and cultural development during this period, the meanings behind domestic objects sub…
Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s by Martha L. Olney
450 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE been to further push out the boundaries of the history-of-planning held itself by incorporating planning by the private sector into his discussion. Schultz has made great strides in expanding the scope of the held, but he could have gone much farther. Although its primary contribution is to urban history, the book belongs on the shelf that holds the history of technology and culture as well. It is all about…
Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s
Lord of Attention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the Crowd Metaphor in Industrializing America by Gregory W. Bush
600 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE she makes a significant contribution to American history that elo quently demonstrates the necessity of addressing gender when writ ing the history of technology. Joseph J. Corn Dr. Corn teaches the history of technology at Stanford University. His most recent publication is “Work and Vehicles,” in Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford, eds., The Car and the City (1991). Lord ofAttention: Gerald Stanley Lee …
Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing
The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture
Whether catchy or mellow, music has helped sell goods and services for millennia. Modern communication intermediaries, such as advertising agents, and the rise of broadcasting expanded commercial music's reach, intensity, and costs into national and international markets. Timothy D. Taylor's The Sounds of Capitalism draws out this twentieth-century story through extensive research in archives, the trade press, interviews, and, yes, the music itse…
How business historians can save the world – from the fallacy of self-made success
Narratives about ‘self-made’ success form a pillar of Anglo-American lore, but the concept’s meanings and applications no longer reflect either its origins or how people actually succeed. Ideological competition has reshaped the Calvinists’ admiration for community-serving self-improvement into a Social Darwinian glorification of individual ambition and wealth. American and British business and political leaders now invoke this newer narrative to…
Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art
Journal Article Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art. By Michele H. Bogart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography. By Patricia Johnston. Berkeley: University of California Press Get access Pamela Walker Laird Pamela Walker Laird University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86…
Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle
Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle. By Lukas Rieppel. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 325 pp. $29.95.) Pamela Walker Laird Pamela Walker Laird University of Colorado Denver, Denver, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4,…
Putting social capital to work
In arguing for social capital's relevance to business activities, I once set aside day trading – along with outright gambling – as an exception. Day trading's practitioners operate independently of
Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey
Journal Article Made in America: Self Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey. By Jeffrey Louis Decker. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. xxx, 170 pp. Cloth, $44.95, ISBN 0-8166-3020-8. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8166-3021-6.) Get access Pamela Walker Laird Pamela Walker Laird University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume…
The Public's Historians
The Public’s Historians Pamela Walker Laird (bio) Students in my public history classes generally start out wondering why the topics extend beyond setting up attractive exhibitions, raising funds, conserving artifacts, and other practical matters. The class readings and discussions steadily draw people to recognizing the relevance of addressing social constructions, rightful ownership of artifacts, diverse voices, and the relative merits of comme…
The Challenge of Exhibiting Historical Advertisements
New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America
New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America by Richard S. Tedlow
622 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the emerging media as a natural evolution of preceding inventions. Such associations are often weak in broadcasting texts. On the whole, the volume more than adequately addresses the science, technology, and culture of broadcasting and excels in its delineation of the industry’s business and social structures. The histories are clear and concise. The language, even in technical areas, is easily assimilated …
Lord of Attention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the Crowd Metaphor in Industrializing America by Gregory W. Bush
600 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE she makes a significant contribution to American history that elo quently demonstrates the necessity of addressing gender when writ ing the history of technology. Joseph J. Corn Dr. Corn teaches the history of technology at Stanford University. His most recent publication is “Work and Vehicles,” in Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford, eds., The Car and the City (1991). Lord ofAttention: Gerald Stanley Lee …
Lord of Attention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the Crowd Metaphor in Industrializing America
Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s by Martha L. Olney
450 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE been to further push out the boundaries of the history-of-planning held itself by incorporating planning by the private sector into his discussion. Schultz has made great strides in expanding the scope of the held, but he could have gone much farther. Although its primary contribution is to urban history, the book belongs on the shelf that holds the history of technology and culture as well. It is all about…
Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s
Auto Opium: A Social History of Automobile Design
Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture by Timothy B. Spears
374 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture, By Timothy B. Spears. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp· xx+300; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. How did the products of the Industrial Revolution find their ways into the American heartland? Who carried news of the products and argued on their behalf before national brand advertising took over much of that…
The Car without a Single Weakness: Early Automobile Advertising
Cover Design “THE CAR WITHOUT A SINGLE WEAKNESS”: EARLY AUTOMOBILE ADVERTISING PAMELA WALKER LAIRD And speaking about hills, I want to tell you that the best part of automobiling—that part that gets you harder than anything else—is the way an automobile sweeps uphill. It doesn’t know a hill when it comes to it. A wheelbarrow can run down-hill. . . The auto mobile, however, going down-hill can make old grav itation dizzy, drunk, even with deligh…
Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture
Auto Opium: A Social History of Automobile Design by David Gartman
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 377 xenophobic anxieties and growing sense of nationalism to their need to find comfort in a rapidly changing world by softening the hard edges of technology. Changing and conflicting values inherent in this tension between the old and the new are an underlying theme of the book. As the home eroded as the center of social life and cultural development during this period, the meanings behind domestic objects sub…
Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse
Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse by Richard R. John
512 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE gant study of the medieval economy and its complex legacy; hers is an impressive achievement. Elaine Clark Dr. Clark teaches in the Department of History at the University of Michigan— Dearborn. Spreading the News: The American Postal Systemfrom Franklin to Morse. By Richard R. John. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+369; notes, index. $49.95 (cloth). Innovative applications ofold t…
The Public's Historians
The Public’s Historians Pamela Walker Laird (bio) Students in my public history classes generally start out wondering why the topics extend beyond setting up attractive exhibitions, raising funds, conserving artifacts, and other practical matters. The class readings and discussions steadily draw people to recognizing the relevance of addressing social constructions, rightful ownership of artifacts, diverse voices, and the relative merits of comme…
Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art
Journal Article Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art. By Michele H. Bogart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography. By Patricia Johnston. Berkeley: University of California Press Get access Pamela Walker Laird Pamela Walker Laird University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86…
Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey
Journal Article Made in America: Self Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey. By Jeffrey Louis Decker. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. xxx, 170 pp. Cloth, $44.95, ISBN 0-8166-3020-8. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8166-3021-6.) Get access Pamela Walker Laird Pamela Walker Laird University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume…
Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream (review)
As long as marketers have sought markets, they have subsidized state-of-the-art communication systems for building audiences and projecting their messages. Lawrence R. Samuel provides a lively history of the early decades of one media system, television, emphasizing the reciprocal development of advertising practices and television's capabilities between 1946 and 1964. Fortunately, Samuel assesses advertisements' effectiveness by contemporary dat…
Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (review)
Reviewed by: Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America Pamela Walker Laird (bio) Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. By Giles Slade . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 330. $27.95. Cultures can achieve affluence either by wanting little and producing little or wanting much and producing much, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins taught us. The strength of Giles Slade's Made to Break as history is its …
Looking Toward the Future: Expanding Connections for Business Historians
Last year, Will Hausman gave us a splendid overview of business history's development for his presidential address. Despite his modesty, he treated us to a review of the parallels between his career and the field's progress, which owes much to his dedication to the Business History Conference (BHC) and its various constituencies. What we have within the BHC now, thanks to Will and many others, are multiple opportunities for exciting interactions …
Putting social capital to work
In arguing for social capital's relevance to business activities, I once set aside day trading – along with outright gambling – as an exception. Day trading's practitioners operate independently of
Bringing in Business History Front and Center
Can your students list more than a few items that they touch, wear, eat, or otherwise use that were not made or sold by someone who intended to make money? Do your students know anyone who wants to earn a salary or a proft from a business? Have your students ever seen an advertisement? The answers are completely obvious. And yet, for all our connections with the world of private enterprise— Americans experience an average of three thousand advert…
Advertising and the Rise of Big Business
Advertising has a long history. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of advertising from ancient Rome and Pompeii in the form of painted signs on the walls of buildings. In the Middle Ages, shopkeepers drew attention with hanging signs that displayed an emblem of their respective trades, while street criers and peddlers promoted their wares with combinations of chants, rhymes, humor, and exaggerated speech (1). Most of us are familiar with the …
Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry (review)
Reviewed by: Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry Pamela Walker Laird (bio) Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry. By Bruce D. Epperson. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2010. Pp. vi+294. $45. The bicycle industry’s flame burned brightly in the late 1800s, and the man most famous for fanning that flame was Albert A. Pope. Bruce D. Epperson spent two decades studying the industry and the man, yet, to his credi…
The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture
Whether catchy or mellow, music has helped sell goods and services for millennia. Modern communication intermediaries, such as advertising agents, and the rise of broadcasting expanded commercial music's reach, intensity, and costs into national and international markets. Timothy D. Taylor's The Sounds of Capitalism draws out this twentieth-century story through extensive research in archives, the trade press, interviews, and, yes, the music itse…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Business (14 works) · History (14 works) · Advertising (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Engineering (8 works) · Law (7 works)