Retail Nation
Retail Nation

Author: Donica Belisle

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-02-15

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0774819502

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The experience of walking down a store aisle -- replete with displays, advertisements, salespeople, consumer goods, and infinite choice -- is so common that we often forget retail stores barely existed a century ago. Retail Nation traces Canada’s transformation into a modern consumer nation back to an era when Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and the Hudson’s Bay Company ruled the shopping scene. Between 1890 and 1940, department stores revolutionized selling and shopping by parlaying cheap raw materials, business-friendly government policies, and growing demand for low-priced goods into retail empires that promised to strengthen the nation. Some citizens found happiness and fulfillment in their aisles; others experienced a cold shoulder and a closed door. Retail Nation showcases department stores as agents of nationalism and modernization but reveals that the nation they helped to define -- white, consumerist, middle-class -- was more limited, and contested, than nostalgic portraits of the early department store suggest.

Fighting Fat
Fighting Fat

Author: Wendy Mitchinson

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2018-10-11

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 1487518277

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While the statistics for obesity have been alarming in the twenty-first century, concern about fatness has a history. In Fighting Fat, Wendy Mitchinson discusses the history of obesity and fatness from 1920 to 1980 in Canada. Through the context of body, medicine, weight measurement, food studies, fat studies, and the identity of those who were fat, Mitchinson examines the attitudes and practices of medical practitioners, nutritionists, educators, and those who see themselves as fat. Fighting Fat analyzes a number of sources to expose our culture’s obsession with body image. Mitchinson looks at medical journals, both their articles and the advertisements for drugs for obesity, as well as magazine articles and advertisements, including popular "before and after" weight loss stories. Promotional advertisements reveal how the media encourages negative attitudes towards body fat. The book also includes over 30 interviews with Canadians who defined themselves as fat, highlighting the emotional toll caused by the stigmatizing of fatness.