In mid-twentieth-century America, mass tourism became emblematic of the expanding horizons associated with an affluent, industrial society. Nowhere was the image of leisurely travel more visible than in the parade of glossy articles and advertisements that beckoned readers from the pages of popular magazines. In Richard K. Popp’s The Holiday Makers, the magazine industry serves as a window into postwar media and consumer society, showing how the dynamics of market research and commercial print culture helped shape ideas about place, mobility, and leisure. 

Richard K. Popp is assistant professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Advance Praise for The Holiday Makers

“Read The Holiday Makers on the plane as you travel to your vacation or on the beach once you get there—or even in your study or den. Read it because this is a terrific book that reveals how, beginning in the 1920s, advertising agencies, market researchers, magazine editors, and government agencies helped create the modern American vacation and the narratives that told Americans how to think about them. Initially they fostered a culture of leisure, mobility, and mass consumption. And then Popp intriguingly explores how beginning in the mid-1960s the quest for authenticity and the development of niche marketing began to transform the meanings of American vacations.”—Daniel Horowitz, author of Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World

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