Republic of Drivers looks back at the period between 1895 and 1961—from the founding of the first automobile factory in America to the creation of the Interstate Highway System—to find out how driving evolved into a crucial symbol of ...

Author: Cotten Seiler

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 9780226745657

Category: Transportation

Page: 240

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Rising gas prices, sprawl and congestion, global warming, even obesity—driving is a factor in many of the most contentious issues of our time. So how did we get here? How did automobile use become so vital to the identity of Americans? Republic of Drivers looks back at the period between 1895 and 1961—from the founding of the first automobile factory in America to the creation of the Interstate Highway System—to find out how driving evolved into a crucial symbol of freedom and agency. Cotten Seiler combs through a vast number of historical, social scientific, philosophical, and literary sources to illustrate the importance of driving to modern American conceptions of the self and the social and political order. He finds that as the figure of the driver blurred into the figure of the citizen, automobility became a powerful resource for women, African Americans, and others seeking entry into the public sphere. And yet, he argues, the individualistic but anonymous act of driving has also monopolized our thinking about freedom and democracy, discouraging the crafting of a more sustainable way of life. As our fantasies of the open road turn into fears of a looming energy crisis, Seiler shows us just how we ended up a republic of drivers—and where we might be headed.

American continent, the fascination with freedom of movement only intensified, as Americans increasingly conflated ... 20 Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, University of Chicago ...

Author: Laurent Tissot

Publisher: Alphil-Presses universitaires suisses

ISBN: 9782940489701

Category: Transportation

Page: 260

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For decades scholars in diverse fields have examined problems in the history of mobility. Their diversity was their strength but also their limitation, as disciplinary boundaries impeded the exchange of ideas that lets scholarship flourish. Since 2003 the International Association for the History of Traffic, Transport and Mobility (T2M) has served as a free-trade zone, fostering a new interdisciplinary vitality in a now-flourishing field. Now, with the publication of its first yearbook, T2M has surveyed these gains in the form of a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of research in the field. Here, twenty-seven scholars in the history of mobility, from sixteen countries and five continents, present synopses of recent research. Besides reviews of research in thirteen countries, contributions also include thematic reviews relating mobility to the environment, automobile fetishism, race, gender, and other transnational themes. All in all, more than sixty scholars within and beyond T2M cooperated in this project, making it a truly collective work.

I take the prefix American from Cotten Seiler's Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. While his history is focused on the United States, the term American goes beyond national borders to “signify myth, ...

Author: Michael W. Pesses

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

ISBN: 9781498598200

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 125

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Ecomobilities examines the American cultural attachment to automobility. By analyzing the role of machines and transportation in apocalyptic films, Michael W. Pesses reveals the ideological connections between automobiles, the environment, and the end of the world.

C. S. Fisher and G. R. Carroll, 'Telephone and Automobile Diffusion in the United States 1902–1937', American Journal of ... Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, ...

Author: Colin Divall

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781317317265

Category: History

Page: 272

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For the majority of us the opportunity to travel has never been greater, yet differences in mobility highlight inequalities that have wider social implications. Exploring how and why attitudes towards movement have evolved across generations, the case studies in this essay collection range from medieval to modern times and cover several continents.

For works on African-American civil rights struggles, see Merline Pitre, In Struggle Against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White ... Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), ...

Author: Kyle Shelton

Publisher: University of Texas Press

ISBN: 9781477314678

Category: History

Page:

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Since World War II, Houston has become a burgeoning, internationally connected metropolis—and a sprawling, car-dependent city. In 1950, it possessed only one highway, the Gulf Freeway, which ran between Houston and Galveston. Today, Houston and Harris County have more than 1,200 miles of highways, and a third major loop is under construction nearly thirty miles out from the historic core. Highways have driven every aspect of Houston's postwar development, from the physical layout of the city to the political process that has transformed both the transportation network and the balance of power between governing elites and ordinary citizens. Power Moves examines debates around the planning, construction, and use of highway and public transportation systems in Houston. Kyle Shelton shows how Houstonians helped shape the city's growth by attending city council meetings, writing letters to the highway commission, and protesting the destruction of homes to make way for freeways, which happened in both affluent and low-income neighborhoods. He demonstrates that these assertions of what he terms "infrastructural citizenship" opened up the transportation decision-making process to meaningful input from the public and gave many previously marginalized citizens a more powerful voice in civic affairs. Power Moves also reveals the long-lasting results of choosing highway and auto-based infrastructure over other transit options and the resulting challenges that Houstonians currently face as they grapple with how best to move forward from the consequences and opportunities created by past choices.

Flink, Car Culture, 38; Cotton Seiler, A Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), ch. 1. 15. Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor ...

Author: Gary S. Cross

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 9780226341781

Category: History

Page: 256

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For American teenagers, getting a driver’s license has long been a watershed moment, separating teens from their childish pasts as they accelerate toward the sweet, sweet freedom of their futures. With driver’s license in hand, teens are on the road to buying and driving(and maybe even crashing) their first car, a machine which is home to many a teenage ritual—being picked up for a first date, “parking” at a scenic overlook, or blasting the radio with a gaggle of friends in tow. So important is this car ride into adulthood that automobile culture has become a stand-in, a shortcut to what millions of Americans remember about their coming of age. Machines of Youth traces the rise, and more recently the fall, of car culture among American teens. In this book, Gary S. Cross details how an automobile obsession drove teen peer culture from the 1920s to the 1980s, seducing budding adults with privacy, freedom, mobility, and spontaneity. Cross shows how the automobile redefined relationships between parents and teenage children, becoming a rite of passage, producing new courtship rituals, and fueling the growth of numerous car subcultures. Yet for teenagers today the lure of the automobile as a transition to adulthood is in decline.Tinkerers are now sidelined by the advent of digital engine technology and premolded body construction, while the attention of teenagers has been captured by iPhones, video games, and other digital technology. And adults have become less tolerant of teens on the road, restricting both cruising and access to drivers’ licenses. Cars are certainly not going out of style, Cross acknowledges, but how upcoming generations use them may be changing. He finds that while vibrant enthusiasm for them lives on, cars may no longer be at the center of how American youth define themselves. But, for generations of Americans, the modern teen experience was inextricably linked to this particularly American icon.

Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Seymour, Miranda. The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend. London: Simon & Shuster, 2004.

Author: Chris Lezotte

Publisher: McFarland

ISBN: 9781476631738

Category: Transportation

Page: 200

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Since their introduction in 1964, American muscle cars have been closely associated with masculinity. In the 21st century, women have been a growing presence in the muscle car world, exhibiting classic cars at automotive events and rumbling to work in modern Mustangs, Camaros and Challengers. Informed by the experiences of 88 female auto enthusiasts, this book highlights women’s admiration and passion for American muscle, and reveals how restoring, showing and driving classic and modern cars provides a means to challenge longstanding perceptions of women drivers and advance ideas of identity and gender equality.

... Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2000). 3.

Author: Genevieve Carpio

Publisher: University of California Press

ISBN: 9780520298828

Category: History

Page: 386

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There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.

3. Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5. 4. John Urry, “The 'System' of Automobility,” Theory, Culture & Society 21, nos. 4–5 (2004): 25–26.

Author: Ross Barrett

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

ISBN: 9781452943954

Category: Nature

Page: 456

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In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.

The cultural history of the automobile in America—the myriad ways in which automobility shaped twentieth-century ... Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Author: Carl-Henry Geschwind

Publisher: Lexington Books

ISBN: 9781498553810

Category: History

Page: 256

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This study examines gasoline taxation policies since the early twentieth century. Comparing and contrasting policies in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, the author analyzes the origins of gasoline taxation and the various approaches to its implementation and highlights the role played by fiscal crises.