A: Author Qualifications and Interests A native of Texas, Lendol Calder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980 and later received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1993. Calder is currently a professor of history and African American studies at Augustana College and is currently working on an analysis of the philosophy of thrift in history and American culture with a team of researchers organized by the Templeton Foundation and the Institute for the Advanced Study of American Culture at the University of Virginia. He is a specialist in the history of American consumerism and this interest led him to study the progression of consumer credit in America when little else had been published on the subject. Calder draws on some of his own experience with consumer credit, in the form of a department store credit card he and his wife got early in their marriage to buy what he says being “a set of furniture costing twice as much as we could have recovered”. from our bank account. (p.5) Most of his presumptions, however, were rejected in his explorations of the "ups and downs of consumer credit" (p.16) due to the fact that most common-sense beliefs about The history of credit is actually a myth. In Calder's Acknowledgments, he thanks his parents for helping him and saving him "from having to do unwanted personal research on the subject of debt." (p.xiii)B: Main Point or Thesis of the Book Calder's thesis for this book follows the development of American consumer culture from its unorganized beginnings around the 1890s to around the 1940s. There are several references to credit and debt outside of this range as a reference to where we started and in the middle of the document......I made a point of finding out on the next page that he had made an argument against the previous point. Additionally, I found it strange that the end of his historical study occurred in the 1940s. Consumer credit in the United States has changed since then, but not as dramatically as in the 1910s and 1920s. Nonetheless, I think he did an incredible job of putting together the evidence of debts that existed at a time when such things were very private. At the beginning of this book, he stated that he "took a national approach...to cast [his] net wide to gather as much documentation as possible." (p.15) The old flyers and seemingly inconsequential journal entries really gave a personal touch to this obscure corner of American history. Before reading this book, I was one of the proponents of the “myth of lost economic virtue” (p. 23), but now I have a new, more precise view of this subject...