The American Historical Review June 2006 [antikvár]

In This IssueThe June issue has three articles that take us from wigs to chocolate to modernity, and an AHR Forum that carries us across three oceans. It also includes our usual extensive section of book reviews.ArticlesIn "Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France," Michael Kwass examines the social and cultural lives of the wig, one of the most successful consumer goods of the eighteenth century. He first charts the social diffusion of the wig, as it spread beyond elite circles to middling groups. Rather than validating simplistic conceptions of consumer revolution, the wig's diffusion illuminates how proliferation of personal accessories in the eighteenth century helped to expand an intermediate zone of consumption situated between aristocratic luxury and popular necessity. It also demonstrates how men as well as women were consumers of fashion in this period. The second part of the article considers the cultural meaning of the wig. Challenging long-standing theories of conspicuous consumption and consumer emulation, Kwass argues that taste leaders attempted to liberate France from a courtly consumer culture in which the main purpose of goods was to mark social status. Publicizing alternative values such as convenience, nature, and self, fashion commentators and wigmakers alike developed strikingly modern conceptions of post-Louis XIV wigs. Although such taste leaders rejected an older hierarchy of raw socio-legal rank, they constructed a new model of distinction that permitted novel consumer values to mediate relationships between consumption and status. Finally, the cultural life of the wig suggests a revision of J. C. Fliigel's "great masculine renunciation," because the repudiation of extravagant wig styles did not necessarily reflect a hardening of gender boundaries."Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics" by Marcy Norton offers a new account of Europeans' development of a taste for American chocolate in the sixteenth century. Europeans learned to consume chocolate in the same ways it was imbibed by indigenous Americansas a fragrant, spicy, sweet, foamy, reddish beverage. While most prior accounts have assumed or asserted that Europeans modified American chocolate to suit their palates, Norton argues that the social conditions that created Spanish colonial and imperial rule led Europeans to adopt Mesoamerican aesthetics. Her findings challenge models of taste based on bio-