Joshua C. Davis

Ph.D. Student
jcdavis@email.unc.edu

Major Field: Post-1945 United States

Other Fields: Cultural History; European History; Consumer History

Advisor: Peter Filene

Research Interests: My dissertation, “Boomer Buyers: Teenage and Young Adult Consumers in 1970s America,” analyzes the rise of a segmented marketplace in which young Baby Boomer consumers articulated sub-cultural identities and distinguished themselves from other Americans.  National discourse from the 1940s to the 1960s framed consumption as a means to achieve a shared "freedom from want" and reduce social inequality, thus providing the glue to unify a diverse American people.  But to the surprise of the so-called Greatest Generation, the vast majority of Boomers who reached their teenage and young adult years in the 1970s did not want to consume in a way that reinforced a sense of common, national identity with other Americans.  Young Boomers’ buying habits in the 1970s reflected the influence of many cultural transformations that had begun in the late 1960s, including the emergence of Black Power and feminism, the rise of a counterculture, and the Sexual Revolution.  The popularization of pants and blue jeans for young women symbolized for many consumers a concrete, if merely aesthetic, consequence of society's growing acceptance of gender equality.  Baby Boomers in the 1970s commonly disregarded legal controls on consumption, and over a third of young adults smoked marijuana regularly. Many pot smokers sought to normalize marijuana and raise support for its decriminalization by framing the prohibited substance as a legitimate consumer commodity.  African American music consumers and businesses envisioned the music marketplace, comprising black-oriented and –owned record stores and radio stations, as a crucial arena in which black communities could secure economic and cultural power.  Finally, the popular (but also maligned) singles bars of the period served a vast population of unmarried young adults, in turn suggesting a transformation of public spaces in post-1960s America from non-profit, civic arenas into more consumer-oriented spaces founded on short-term, and often unsubstantial, social interactions.  By assessing the fragmentation of young consumers in the 1970s, this project will illuminate a central component of the splintering of communities and cultural identities in post-1960s America.