Description: In As Long as We Both Shall Love, Karen M. Dunak provides a nuanced history of the American wedding and its celebrants. Blending an analysis of film, fiction, advertising, and prescriptive literature with personal views from letters, diaries, essays, and oral histories, Dunak demonstrates the ways in which the modern wedding epitomizes a diverse and consumerist culture and aims to reveal an ongoing debate about the power of peer culture, media, and the marketplace in America.
Brief description: Karen M. Dunak is Professor and Arthur G. and Eloise Barnes Cole Chair of American History in the Department of History at Muskingum University. She is the author of As Long As We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America.
Review Quotes: "In this well-researched and often entertaining examination of the symbolic meaning of the wedding ceremony in the post-WWII US, historian Dunak (Muskingum Univ.) argues that the evolution of marriage ceremony mirrors national cultural changes over the past several decades."--K.B. Nutter "Choice"