She contends that a working-class "culture of unity" broke down ethnic divisions and animosities and made possible widescale industrial unionization.

[6] Cohen's analysis of working-class popular culture (shopping, movie-going, and radio) during the 1920s was a pioneering effort in the study of vernacular consumerism,[7] a theme that she developed with more of a political focus in her next book, A Consumers' Republic.

Through a deeply documented history of urban and suburban New Jersey, embedded in a larger analysis about the transformation of post-New Deal liberalism, Cohen explores the ways that people's identities as consumers shaped their politics after World War II.

Building on her interests on architecture, planning, and the built environment, the book is particularly noteworthy for its engagement with earlier work on the politics of suburbanization by scholars like Kenneth T. Jackson.

A Consumer's Republic begins with her recollections of growing up in suburban New Jersey and draws from extensive research in archives in the Garden State.

A Yale-trained lawyer and sometime critic of both Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, Logue saw urban renewal as an extension of the liberal New Deal.