Gary Cross

Today I would probably be called a 20th century US cultural historian with a focus on consumption, childhood, and free time issues. But, as a historian trained in modern French and German history and with research in British and Australian libraries and archives, I have also done comparative history on work, political economy, and time. I have an on-going interest in the modern history of western technology and co-authored a text on the subject.

My abiding theme is the origins, uses, meanings, and consequences of 20th century affluence with books like Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture, An All-Consuming Century, The Playful Crowd, Packaged Pleasures, and, most recently, Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal. Another theme is the modern history of childhood, parenting and generation with Kids’ Stuff: The Cute and the Cool, Men to Boys, and Machines of Youth. Works since my nominal retirement in 2017 explore how sensuality was compressed and made mobile by technology and marketing in the generation around 1900 (Packaged Pleasures), how memory has recently been impacted by the rapid turnover of consumer goods (Consumed Nostalgia), the transformation of recent popular culture seen through the abiding fascination with the “freak.” (Free Show Legacies), and the persistence of long hours of work despite dramatic rises in productivity (Free Time). In 2025, I am exploring historical changes in “times of wonder” as we shift from festivals to fads. I try to reach audiences beyond the academy and encourage students to ask probing and wide-ranging questions about the present that can be explained by the past.

Major Publications:

Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal (New York University Press, 2024).

Freak Show Legacies: How the Cute, Camp, and Creepy Shaped Modern Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Machines of Youth: America’s Car Obsession (University of Chicago, 2018).

Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2015)

Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Transformed Desire (with Robert Proctor), (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Translated into Korean

Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity (Columbia University Press, 2008)

The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (with John K. Walton), (Columbia University Press, December 2005)

The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004).

An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (Columbia University Press, 2000).

Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing Worlds of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 1997). Translated into Chinese, 2010.

Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (Routledge, 1993). Translated into Italian, 1998.

A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940, (University of California Press, 1989).