Asphalt Nation
Asphalt Nation

Author: Jane Holtz Kay

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2012-06-20

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 0307819973

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Asphalt Nation is a major work of urban studies that examines how the automobile has ravaged America’s cities and landscape, and how we can fight back. The automobile was once seen as a boon to American life, eradicating the pollution caused by horses and granting citizens new levels of personal freedom and mobility. But it was not long before the servant became the master—public spaces were designed to accommodate the automobile at the expense of the pedestrian, mass transportation was neglected, and the poor, unable to afford cars, saw their access to jobs and amenities worsen. Now even drivers themselves suffer, as cars choke the highways and pollution and congestion have replaced the fresh air of the open road. Today our world revolves around the car—as a nation, we spend eight billion hours a year stuck in traffic. In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay effectively calls for a revolution to reverse our automobile-dependency. Citing successful efforts in places from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, Kay shows us that radical change is not impossible by any means. She demonstrates that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions that can steer us out of the mess. Asphalt Nation is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.

America’s Other Automakers
America’s Other Automakers

Author: Timothy J. Minchin

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2021-04-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0820358932

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In 2018 almost half of all vehicles made in North America were produced at foreign-owned plants, and the sector was on track to monopolize the market. Despite this, the industry has been overlooked compared with its domestic counterpart, both in scholarship and popular memory. Redressing this neglect, America’s Other Automakers provides a new history of the foreignowned auto sector, the first to extensively draw on archival sources and to articulate the human agency of participants, including workers, managers, and industry recruiters. Timothy J. Minchin challenges the view that the industry’s growth primarily reflected incentives, stressing human agency and the complexity of individual stories instead. Deeply human in its approach, the book also explores the industry’s impact on grassroots communities, showing that it had more costs than supporters acknowledged. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, America’s Other Automakers uncovers significant tensions over unionization, reports of discriminatory hiring, and unease about the industry’s rapid growth, critically exploring seven large assembly facilities and their impact on the communities in which they were built.

Cars in America
Cars in America

Author: Andrea C. Nakaya

Publisher: Greenhaven Press, Incorporated

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780737733082

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Presents a collection of essays discussing varying viewpoints on the effect of cars on American society, covering such topics as the link between urban sprawl and automobiles, the role of law in making driving safer, and the country's future transportations needs.

The Automobile and American Life, 2d ed.
The Automobile and American Life, 2d ed.

Author: John Heitmann

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2018-08-14

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 147666935X

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Now revised and updated, this book tells the story of how the automobile transformed American life and how automotive design and technology have changed over time. It details cars' inception as a mechanical curiosity and later a plaything for the wealthy; racing and the promotion of the industry; Henry Ford and the advent of mass production; market competition during the 1920s; the development of roads and accompanying highway culture; the effects of the Great Depression and World War II; the automotive Golden Age of the 1950s; oil crises and the turbulent 1970s; the decline and then resurgence of the Big Three; and how American car culture has been represented in film, music and literature. Updated notes and a select bibliography serve as valuable resources to those interested in automotive history.

Republic of Drivers
Republic of Drivers

Author: Cotten Seiler

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0226745651

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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.

Roadside Relics
Roadside Relics

Author: Will Shiers

Publisher: Motorbooks

Published: 2010-11-06

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1610601149

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Abandoned junk to some, the rusty old steel shells of vehicles are treasures to others, holding memories of a bygone era, or the promise of a pristinely restored, radically customized automobile. Automotive photographer Will Shiers has captured these dreams on film for over ten years, and this volume collects his images between two covers for the first time. Here are the beautiful husks Shiers has found in the United States fields and barns, shops, and salvage yards across States. Divided into five categories—General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Independents, and Special Vehicles—these wrecks and relics from 1910 to the 1970s come equipped with all the relevant information: history, model, location. The most comprehensive and beautifully photographed collection of abandoned cars ever published, this volume preserves for all time the exquisite skeletons of American automotive might.

Comeback
Comeback

Author: Paul Ingrassia

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-05-14

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 1476737479

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In Comeback, Pulitzer Prize-winners Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White take us to the boardrooms, the executive offices, and the shop floors of the auto business to reconstruct, in riveting detail, how America's premier industry stumbled, fell, and picked itself up again. The story begins in 1982, when Honda started building cars in Marysville, Ohio, and the entire U.S. car industry seemed to be on the brink of extinction. It ends just over a decade later, with a remarkable turn of the tables, as Japan's car industry falters and America's Big Three emerge as formidable global competitors. Comeback is a story propelled by larger-than-life characters -- Lee Iacocca, Henry Ford II, Don Petersen, Roger Smith, among many others -- and their greed, pride, and sheer refusal to face facts. But it is also a story full of dedicated, unlikely heroes who struggled to make the Big Three change before it was too late.

Engines of Change
Engines of Change

Author: Paul Ingrassia

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 145164065X

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A narrative like no other: a cultural history that explores how cars have both propelled and reflected the American experience— from the Model T to the Prius. From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the open roads of Route 66, from the lore of Jack Kerouac to the sex appeal of the Hot Rod, America’s history is a vehicular history—an idea brought brilliantly to life in this major work by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Ingrassia. Ingrassia offers a wondrous epic in fifteen automobiles, including the Corvette, the Beetle, and the Chevy Corvair, as well as the personalities and tales behind them: Robert McNamara’s unlikely role in Lee Iacocca’s Mustang, John Z. DeLorean’s Pontiac GTO , Henry Ford’s Model T, as well as Honda’s Accord, the BMW 3 Series, and the Jeep, among others. Through these cars and these characters, Ingrassia shows how the car has expressed the particularly American tension between the lure of freedom and the obligations of utility. He also takes us through the rise of American manufacturing, the suburbanization of the country, the birth of the hippie and the yuppie, the emancipation of women, and many more fateful episodes and eras, including the car’s unintended consequences: trial lawyers, energy crises, and urban sprawl. Narrative history of the highest caliber, Engines of Change is an entirely edifying new way to look at the American story.

Nation on Wheels
Nation on Wheels

Author: Mark S. Foster

Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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Examines the impact of the automobile on American society since the end of World War Two in the areas of mass transit, development of the United Auto Workers, rise of suburbia, auto racing, and the automobile's relationship to the youth culture.