The Financial Times recognized Professor Emerita of History, UW-Madison Colleen Dunlavy’s Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the US into a Manufacturing Powerhouse one of the best summer books of 2024.
Small, Medium, and Large explores the history of mass production and distribution with novel questions about the standardization of sizes for everyday consumer items. She argues that the mass production and consumption that we experience today are because of the promotion of standard sizes by the US government and Herbert Hoover. According to the Financial Times guide: “This book, based on extensive archival research, shows that the standardisation on which today’s economies depend is the product of a close partnership between US public and private sectors, subsequently spread across the world.”
Click here for the full list of Financial Time’s Best Summer Books of 2024: Economics.