Schmidt: How St. Valentine’s Day Created a Retailing Revolution
At Newsday, the Danforth Center’s Leigh Schmidt chronicles the rise in popularity of Valentine’s Day. “The entrepreneurs of the 1840s and ’50s gave new life to St. Valentine’s Day, and the booming market suggested that holidays held vast potential as widely shared rituals of consumption,” he writes. “On Feb. 14 and other holidays as well, we remain the heirs of that antebellum enterprise.”