College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item More Than Luck: Lucky Strike Advertising During the George Washington Hill Years: 1926-1946(2015) Stump, Tyler S.; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From the time George Hill assumed the presidency of the American Tobacco Company in 1926 until his death in 1946, the company spent more money advertising Lucky Strikes than had ever before been spent on a single product. During Hill's tenure, Americans bought more than 100 billion Lucky Strikes annually. Hill's carefully engineered and innovative advertising campaigns integrated print, radio, public relations, and other forms of advertising to great success in the 1920s and 1930s as the company sought out a mass audience. By World War II, however, the company changed strategies as it increasingly diversified its advertisements to reflect new conceptions of audience segmentation. This abandonment of a "great mass audience" approach paralleled changes in other cultural industries in this period, demonstrating the significance of advertising as part of the mid-century cultural landscape and emphasizing the genius of the ATC's marketing.Item Retailing Religion: Business Promotionalism in American Christian Churches in the Twentieth Century(2011) Hardin, John Curran; Sicilia, David B.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Evangelist Billy Graham once remarked, "We are selling the greatest product on earth - belief in God - why shouldn't we promote it as effectively as we promote a bar of soap?" His comparison is misleading in its simplicity, since it strikes at the heart of the complex relationship between religion and the modern American marketplace. Retailing Religion examines how American Christian churches in the twentieth century promoted their institutions and messages by adopting modern public relations, advertising, personal sales, and marketing techniques from the secular business community. Retailing Religion develops four principal themes. First, Christian churches in the twentieth century followed the promotional trends of corporate firms with only a slight lag time. Second, this borrowing nurtured the growth of rationalism and individualism in American Christianity, which contributed significantly to the religion's modernization. This transformation was especially pronounced in churches' growing dependence on rational methods and numerical metrics, and in their transition from a producer orientation to a consumer orientation. Third, church promotional efforts increased not the secularization but the pluralization of American Christianity by erecting a platform for cooperation among churches, denominations, and religions. Fourth, church promotionalism fostered an ongoing tension between their sacred mission and their secular methods. Wrestling with this tension, both advocates and critics of church promotion labored throughout the century to develop historical, theological, and pragmatic arguments to defend or denounce the practices. The tension was so complex and often contradictory that some of the strongest advocates for religious retailing were also its biggest critics. The key historical actors in this study are the leading pioneers and practitioners of church promotion: organizations such as the Religious Public Relations Council; experts such as Gaines Dobbins, Philip Kotler, Peter Drucker, and George Barna; pastors such as Robert Schuller, Bill Hybels, and Rick Warren; and critics such as David Wells and Os Guinness. In tracing their adoption, development, implementation, and dissemination of the latest business promotional methods, Retailing Religion provides a broad portrait of American religion's struggle to remain both faithful to the divine and relevant to the world.Item How Cadillac Became Cadillac(2010) Benson, Edwin John Mortimer; Sicilia, David B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the process by which General Motors' Cadillac brand of automobiles came to dominate the U.S. luxury car market between 1927 and 1960. In 1927, Cadillac was only one among a crowded field of U.S. and European automobiles priced above $3000, the threshold of the luxury car market at the time. Through a skillful process of marketing, the corporate strength of General Motors, and the mistakes and ill-fortune of its competitors; Cadillac came to hold at least 50% of the U.S. luxury car market throughout the 1950s, and in some years accounted for nearly 70% of that market. It also briefly examines the reasons for Cadillac's decline in the market during the years since 1960.Item Race and Mass Consumption in Consumer Culture: National Trademark Advertising Campaigns in the United States and Germany, 1890-1930(2008-02-25) Cserno, Isabell; Thornton Dill, Bonnie; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how and why visual imagery in selected advertising material in the United States and Germany between 1890 and 1930 influenced the materialization of mass consumption as an important part of national culture. What emerges out of this study is a comparison of two different national environments that despite cultural differences relied on discourses on racialized identities to attract consumers and sell brand name products. This dissertation proposes that in both countries, trade card series in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century helped establish visual elements as important communicators to mass consumers, especially by drawing on easily recognizable motifs of patriotic and racialized mythologization. By the turn of the nineteenth century, as newspaper and magazine advertising continued to grow, the visual compositions of advertisements continued to become more sophisticated in both narrative as well as stylistic composition. This work relies equally on scholarship from the traditional disciplines of history and art history, as well as from the growing interdisciplinary work produced in American Studies, especially its subdivision of visual and material culture. The multidisciplinary methods of African American Studies and other related fields such as Black Diaspora Studies have shaped this dissertation's theoretical foundation of the complex processes of racialization. This dissertation examines three brand name products that started using black trade characters as their trademarks: Aunt Jemima pancakes and Cream of Wheat in the United States, and Sarotti Chocolate in Germany. All three product campaigns emerge at a time of complex social and economic changes as both Germany and the United States evolved as powerful nation-states with colonial and imperialist politics.