Introduction: When History Becomes Child’s Play

Lisa Jacobson is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (2004). Her edited volumes include Capitalism’s Hidden Worlds (2020), co-edited with Kenneth Lipartito, and Children and Consumer Culture in American Society (2008), a collection of essays and primary source documents. Her work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including the Journal of Social History, Enterprise and Society, Food, Culture, and Society, and the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Fashioning New Cultures of Drink: Alcoholic Beverages and the Politics of Pleasure, which examines how the still morally suspect alcohol industry sought legitimacy after Prohibition and transformed wine, beer, and spirits into widely accepted emblems of the good life.