Abstract
When the subject is consumer credit, what are the stories we hear and tell? Muriel Rukeyser, the poet, has written: “The world is made of stories, not of atoms.” To this I would add a corollary: that history is made of stories, before and after it is made of data. For this reason, when thinking about consumer credit, it is necessary before examining the data to consider first of all a large and deceptively simple question, a question that is of particular concern to cultural historians like myself, though more famously associated with journalists. That question is, what is the story? The stories we tell about consumer credit give us the vocabularies we use to construct our conversations about this most important institution of American life. Our notions of how consumer credit came to be, what it replaced, and what it means shape the kinds of questions we ask, the sorts of evidence we seek, and to some extent, what we allow ourselves to see. Understanding the history of consumer credit, then, requires that we ask ourselves, what is the story?
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Calder, L. (2002). The Evolution of Consumer Credit in the United States. In: Durkin, T.A., Staten, M.E. (eds) The Impact of Public Policy on Consumer Credit. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1415-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1415-2_2
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