When it comes to tracing the history of consumer culture, the state of Mississippi not commonly associated with urban stores, widespread abundance, or cultural interests that are new and modern-may seem an unlikely place to begin.

For the better part of the state's history, well into the 1960s and the civil rights era, its rural self-reliance, poverty, and divisions along class and racial lines appeared to preclude it as a place where modern ideas about shopping as part of American definitions of freedom would flourish. But a new book by a University of Mississippi professor demonstrates that the same dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that fueled the growth of modern consumerism in the United States likewise played a significant role in the shaping of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum period to the present.

In his American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998 (University of North Carolina Press, $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper), Ted Ownby, associate professor of History and Southern Studies, examines the buying habits of Mississippians from early plantation days to the present.

Many of Ownby's conclusions in this innovative study are surprising. His analysis of Faulkner's fictional character Montgomery Ward Snopes, who represents the worst aspects of crass consumer culture, reveals the small Southern town as an unexpectedly modern shopping environment. Similarly, using sources as diverse as blues lyrics, plantation and general store ledgers, letters from wealthy plantation and store owners on buying trips, and some of Mississippi's most respected fiction writers, his treatment defies traditional wisdom about shopping, consumer culture, and the South. In the process, he offers a new way to understand the connections between power and culture in the American South.

For cash-poor farmers, the experience of shopping was widely viewed with a duality that encompassed both fear and excitement. Along with its recognized potential to put people into debt, evidence shows that it also presented an opportunity for escape outside their everyday life.

"It was no coincidence that many Mississippians used the same term to describe both the time needed to pay debts and the expenses they considered frivolous," Ownby writes. "Both were indulgences, and in the language of 19th-century political and religious thinking, indulgence was both economically dangerous and sinful."

A decade in the research and the writing, the book analyzes the changing relationship between shopping and race relations. While postbellum general stores were some of the least segregated settings in the South, African Americans never felt completely free in white-owned stores, out of fear of both debt and potential violence.

Many wealthy whites in the postbellum era believed black Mississippians were wasteful shoppers who spent their money on useless novelties and were thus better off as sharecroppers who had little cash for most of the year. As the book relates, African Americans tried to economize but also used shopping and goods as ways to rebel against the expectations of white landowners to look the part of the poor in their dress and other forms of self expression.

Along with the arrival of department stores and five-and-dime stores and the effects these more egalitarian shopping opportunities had on women, class, and race relations, the book looks at the ways different groups interpreted the changing nature of goods and shopping as segregation came to an end. It examines the way four of Mississippi's greatest writers-William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright and William Alexander Percy-treat the subject of goods and shopping. It also discusses the role of consumer boycotts in the civil rights movement and closes with an epilogue that details the rise of retail operations like Wal-Marts and antique stores.

In addition to American Dreams in Mississippi, Ownby is the author of Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920. He is also editor of the journal Mississippi Folklife.

MICHAEL HARRELSON

Photograph by David Wharton