Mayer, Ruth (1998):
"'Taste It!': American Advertising, Ethnicity, and the Rhetoric of Nationhood in the 1920s." Media and Cultural Memory. Special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies 43.1: 131-141.
Journal Article
Abstract

This essay explores the analogies between the apparently most controversial discourses of consumer culture and ethnicity in the 1920s. In both discourses, the imagery of commemoration is of focal importance, and both shift from personal recollection to collective memory and ultimately evoke sensuous experience as an ideal and all-inclusive approach to a national/ethnic past. By emphasizing sensation over reflection and ephiphany over personal experience, both discourses subtly devaluate the need for individual recollection, replacing an actual past with its mythical image, an image which eventually renders personal experience superfluous - so that forgetting the actual past becomes a prerequisite for a 'true' memory of national/ethnic values.