The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar

The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar explores how mid-century marketers and advertisers created the concept of the teenager as model consumer, an idea that has driven our culture ever since.

Katharine Rollwagen is a professor in the history department of Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia, and a grateful guest on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. Her work has appeared in the Urban History Review, Histoire sociale/Social History, Historical Studies in Education, and the Canadian Historical Review.

In this engaging book, Rollwagen provides a close reading of an impressive array of primary sources, informed by the theoretical insights of cultural and media studies, but always with an eye to the historical context that is so important to ground those insights.

Donica Belisle, professor of history, University of Regina:

An impressive contribution to the histories of youth and consumer culture, The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar shows how the two emerged in relation with each other.