American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998

American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998. By Ted Ownby. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 248 pp. Photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95. ISBN: Cloth 0-807-82479-8; paper 0-- 807-84806-9.

Reviewed by Mary Stovall Richards

Any book that incorporates discussions of Gladys Presley and William Faulkner on consumer culture in Mississippi promises to be an inventive and engaging history. Ted Ownby's new work never fails to deliver on that expectation. Drawing on a vast array of primary sources and supplemented by evocative photographs, Ownby confounds those (including this Mississippi …