Years ago, I read Pricing the Priceless Child for a class, about the development of life insurance on children, particularly driven by the social pressure for elaborate Victorian funerals. This is a re-issue of Zelizer's original dissertation in sociology, which lays the foundation for her subsequent work on the commodification of life via insurance and actuarial tables. Despite being willing to insure property (including slaves), early Americans found life insurance to be too close to denying providence and gambling, especially since most people of means had land that would support a widow and orphans should they die. It was only the rise of a white collar middle class divorced from farm property and dependent on a single-income professional skill that moved life insurance into the realm of respectable necessity. Using advertising, sales handbooks (join a lot of clubs! pressure your suburban neighbors!), the process for constructing risk tables and religious sermons, Zelizer tracks this transition to lives having price tags. Interesting side lights are the African-American insurance companies founded to give access to policies in a segregated world, advertising which pitched insurance to men as a way to keep your widow from remarrying and forgetting you, and the Jewish-American practice of having rabbinical students support themselves by owning the community's insurance book (which the congregation bought, rather than the rabbi sold). Right alongside this, of course, was insurance related crime--substituting a healthy person for a sick one at the medical exam, insuring homeless elderly people, and murdering a spouse for profit (double indemnity!).