Family Game Night: Board Games from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the rise of industrialization and a gendered division of labor set the stage for tastemakers, architects, and social reformers to elevate the home parlor as a space for leisure and family gathering. Board game makers and marketers capitalized on these trends by peddling a certain exclusionary brand of the American dream.

In Family Game Night, Susan R. Asbury provides a history of US board games from the 1880s through the 1920s, the morals and...