About the Author

Lisa C. Tolbert is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Recipient of the UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching (2013), she teaches courses in American cultural history, research methods, visual and material culture, and historical thinking pedagogy. Her research synthesizes methods of vernacular architecture history, geography, and cultural history. In addition to her work on twentieth-century consumer culture, she has also written about the antebellum South. Her book, Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee, analyzes the relationships between material and social contexts of town life to argue that small towns played a distinctive and influential role in nineteenth-century Southern culture. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, forty-five years after the very first customers made their way through the King Piggly Wiggly checkout line.