“Big-Box Nation: Target, Retail, and Creating the American Landscape” focuses on Minneapolis-based retailer Target Corporation to examine how big-box stores became a common feature of the American landscape, whether in rural Iowa or urban Boston. Retail emerged as one of the most powerful industries in the United States during the twentieth century by mastering the mass distribution counterpart to mass production. As retail’s influence grew, so too did its impact on American life and government. Such influence made retail an important part of twentieth-century urban planning, from downtown consumer palaces to postwar suburban shopping centers, and from urban revitalization projects to brownfield redevelopments. The rise of modern environmental legislation during the 1970s, however, posed an unprecedented threat to retailers. While other industries faced the full brunt of environmental regulation, retail—despite its large environmental impact from its promotion of auto-dependency and its connection of consumers with ecologically damaging global supply chains—largely escaped the state’s regulatory reach. Target promoted consumer choice as an American value, lobbied at Congressional hearings to avoid penalties under the Clean Air Act and other environmental legislation, partnered with the federal government to build favorable relations, and launched corporate public relations campaigns to promote itself as a public citizen and retail as an environmentally responsible industry. The dissertation is the first to examine the political and environmental history of retail. Historical studies on big-box stores have overwhelmingly focused on Walmart and its connection to the rise of the service economy, modern conservatism and rural, blue-collar neopopulism. Target’s midwestern origin in urban, liberal Minneapolis complicates previous narratives of big-box retail and reveals the ways in which business looked to the state as an ally in their rise. Environmental historians, on the other hand, have detailed many ways in which twentieth-century mass consumption affected landscapes in the United States and across the world, yet the material and domestic sites where Americans purchased the products made from the labor, energy, and resources of these distant places has not yet been examined as a window onto a unique form of environmental negotiation and corporate power. / 2026-09-18T00:00:00Z