Proposal: American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Boston, January 6-9, 2011
Affiliate Society Session, Society of Automotive Historians
Organizer: John A. Heitmann, University of Dayton, 300 College Park, Dayton, OH, 45469-15649
Chair: John Heitmann
Panel Participants: Peter Norton, University of Virginia; Cotten Seiler, Dickinson College; Georgine Clarsen, University of Wollongong; David Lucsko, Auburn University.
Commentator: Clay McShane, Northeastern University
Session Title: Looking Through the Windshield: Interdisciplinary and Transnational Perspectives on Automobility, Infrastructure, and Society
Session Abstract:
It has been said that the automobile is the perfect technological symbol of American (and indeed to a large extent western) culture, a tangible expression of our quest to level space, time and class, and a reflection of our restless mobility, social and otherwise. It has influenced the foods we eat; music we listen to; risks we take; places we visit; errands we run; emotions we feel; movies we watch; stress we endure; and, the air we breathe. Yet only within the past decade has historical scholarship decidedly taken us beyond the automobile’s windshield, beyond the motor car as an artifact or the places where it was made. This proposed session features four studies reflective of the new scholarship. Presenters will focus on spaces beyond the windshield -- streets, junkyards, and the highways and byways associated with vastly different and distinctive cultures.
During the past two decades numerous younger scholars have built on James J. Flink and John B. Rae’s foundational efforts to characterize the history of the automobile in a broader context. In the process, they have employed alternative lenses for the reconstruction of the past. The four panelists in this proposed session are examining such topics as: the engaging story that pits a number of diverse constituencies in a struggle over who would control city streets.; American perceptions concerning Chinese highway construction, automobile ownership, and the modernization; differing narratives, including those of race and gender, that automobile historians tell in different national contexts; and “automotive afterlives “ within a broader context. While the starting point of these studies has been the automobile, not all of these scholars consider themselves automobile historians in the strictest of terms. Rather, the automobile is a handle from which one might explore issues related to facets reflective of the complexities of modern life. In this session, the panelists will reflect not only on work recently completed, but on their future endeavors. In doing so, they shall explore themes and topics that remain fertile for future study in terms of the history of technology, as well as social and cultural history.
Presentation 1 – Changing Perspectives on the Street, Dr. Peter Norton, University of Virginia.When I wrote "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" I found that most researchers who were interested in similar problems took automobiles as their frame of reference. Over the course of my research, I found my primary sources relentlessly pushing me to take a different reference frame. What began as a study of cars in cities became, against my will, a study of streets. Only late in my research did I surrender to this greater power. Only then did I find that I had something truly new and valuable to say. Pre-automotive uses of streets were surprisingly diverse, and have lessons to offer those who care to study them. Thus I was gratified that among my book's most enthusiastic readers were non-historians who found that historical perspectives on the city street were helpful to those seeking to re-imagine the street for the twenty-first century. In some of my present and future work, and in this presentation, I wish to show how historians of automobiles and streets, without sacrificing their role as impartial observers, can draw on a study of streets' past to deepen current analyses of streets as spaces with many possibilities.
Presentation 2 -- Chinese Automobility and U.S. Rhetorics of Identicality, Dr. Cotten Seiler, Dickinson College.
Beginning in the early 1990s, China embarked on a roadbuilding program to surpass the United States’ 47,000-mile Interstate Highway System. The state’s monumental initiative is the official manifestation of the car culture currently being constructed by and for the rising middle class, especially in the booming coastal cities. Car dealerships, insurance and rental agencies, mechanic shops, driving schools, and car clubs are proliferating, as are instances of roadside vernacular architecture, car-dependent residential and shopping districts, and car-themed popular culture. China is, in other words, installing the apparatus of automobility, an interlocking set of economic, social, philosophical, legal, political, aesthetic structures and psychological dispositions that facilitate and normativize automobile use. Given the potential effects of China’s automobility on not merely its own economy, politics, and environment, but on those of the entire world, it is not surprising that its growth has been chronicled, celebrated, and fretted over in global print, broadcast, and online media.
This essay examines how Chinese automobility registers, in contemporary U.S. mainstream media, as a harbinger of China’s eventual resemblance of the United States. Accounts of China’s automobility posit the practices of driving and car ownership, as well as automobility’s built environment, as performing a sort of missionary work, fostering, in conjunction with other politically significant novel everyday practices and institutions, postsocialist subjectivities based in individual autonomy, agency, and choice. Though many of these accounts offer baleful environmental and political visions of an automobilized China, these tend to be eclipsed by a vision of China politically and economically liberalized by automobility.
The anxious and enthralled chroniclers of Chinese automobility join a long U.S. tradition of China-watching built and refined in changing historical contexts of political, economic, and spiritual interest in China. The recent accounts of Chinese automobility examined in this essay are remarkable for their repudiation of the pejorative culturalism that suffused most earlier representations. The essential backwardness that, in the eyes of earlier American observers, rendered China incorrigibly unreceptive to modernity, has virtually disappeared. Instead, these accounts attribute to China a fundamental semblance to the United States, a sameness they describe as both radically new (the product of China’s transition to capitalism) and having always been there (but occluded and unnaturally suppressed under Maoist socialism). Automobility is useful as an index of this sameness precisely because of the way in which it represents, in built form and performative practice, the configuration of social, political, and economic modernity found in the twentieth-century United States.
Presentation 3 -- Around or Across: What Difference does a Trajectory Make?
Dr. Georgine Clarsen, The University of Wollongong.
‘Car culture’ and ‘American car culture’ often seem to mean much the same thing. The slippage should not come as a surprise, as the United States has been the foremost automobile nation throughout most of the twentieth century and has produced the greatest quantity of scholarly analysis on how cars have been taken up into people’s lives. Automobility is, in James Fink’s well-known words, ‘as American as apple pie, the Declaration of Independence, and the stars and stripes’. Historians of American automobility have been instrumental in setting the conceptual frameworks for a global historiography.
The question this paper will address is, ‘where does that conjoining of ‘American’ with ‘car culture’ leave those of us in other national contexts seeking to understand the historical diversity of automobilic trajectories?’ I will consider this question from the point of view of a historian of automobility who is trying to offer accounts that ring true to the specificities of Australian social arrangements, material conditions and ideological assumptions.
The paper will tease out some of the commonalities and disjunctions between American and Australian automobility by examining the practices of long distance, pioneering automobile journeys in Australia and America. Arduous ‘Around Australia’ automobile journeys across the ‘trackless wastes’ of the continent quickly became an exemplary form of Australian automobile touring. Although a minority practice undertaken by a few intrepid motorists, mostly men, these long-distance automobile journeys garnered tremendous national interest and widespread media coverage. They retained their fascination well into the 1950s, when the whole nation stopped to cheer hundreds of drivers as they thrashed their cars around the continent in a wild celebration of coming post-war prosperity.
Australian practices of pioneering automobile journeys drew on the American experience, but there were important differences that can tell us much about the role of automobility in national formation as well as the role of national projects in shaping cultures of automobility.
The differences between the experiences on either side of the Pacific are symbolized in the divergent trajectories of Australian and American long-distance touring – the first a circulation that traced the outline of the continent and returned the traveller to a point of origin; the other a straight line across the middle of the continent, which brought the traveller to another place altogether.
Presentation 4 -- “Hot Rods and Junkyards: Peeking at the Fringes of the Car Culture,” Dr. David Lucsko, Auburn University.
My research interests primarily concern alternative ways of approaching the history of the automobile in the United States—or rather, more precisely, alternative lenses through which to examine the development of America’s car culture. In particular, I am interested in the role of automotive enthusiasts, those for whom the car is more than a purely utilitarian tool for getting from point A to point B. For although a great deal has already been written about the American car culture, any attempt to fully grasp its implications is bound to falter unless one grapples not just with mass production, mass consumption, and mass mobility, but also with the much-less-tangible desires and enthusiasms that go with it. After all, much of what gives our car culture its flair—sports cars, hot rods, customs, NASCAR, dragstrips, demolition derbies, candy-apple-red paint, car art—has very little to do with mobility or utility.
Accordingly, in my dissertation (and 2008 book, The Business of Speed: The Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915–1990), I examined the evolution of automotive enthusiasm in the United States. I did so by focusing on the phenomenon known as hot rodding as well as the enthusiast-driven, behind-the-scenes custom-parts business that supports it. This business, a regionally-clustered, specialty-manufacturing sector, produces consumer-market components that enthusiasts use to modify their mass-produced cars. This widespread practice, known as “hot rodding” or “performance tuning,” began in the era of the Model T and continues unabated to the present. My study of this industry, its customers, and the wider hot rodding community emphasizes the role of the enthusiast in shaping our car culture as well as the ongoing significance of custom- and batch-oriented manufacturing in the twentieth-century United States.
Currently I am working on a project that grows out of my earlier research on the business and practice of hot rodding. This new project explores the roles of the end consumer, the enthusiast, and the small businessman in the history of the automobile from an altogether different perspective. Rather than examining the manufacture of cars or parts of any sort, this project focuses instead on the automotive junkyard business and, more broadly, on the use and re-use of vehicles and vehicle components—the “automotive afterlife,” as it were. I approach the history of junkyards small and large, formal and informal, from three main angles. The first is that of the junkyard as a place of business, a source of parts for automotive repair and maintenance that has long stood as a low-budget alternative to aftermarket and replacement-parts suppliers. The second is the junkyard as an environmental challenge; here I examine the evolution of the legal and regulatory framework in which junkyards small and large operate. The third and final angle—and the one of greatest importance to my overall interest in the enthusiasms lurking at the margins of the car culture—is that of automotive enthusiasts, among whom junkyards have long enjoyed an almost mythical status as landscapes of plenty, sources of automotive treasure that are vital to the restoration, preservation, and customization hobbies.
Biographical paragraph or c.v. summary for each participant:
Peter Norton
Peter Norton is a historian interested in technology, engineers and society. He earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Delaware; his Ph.D. is from the University of Virginia. He is an assistant professor in STS, where he has taught since 1998. In 2005 Norton was awarded the Trigon Engineering Society's Hutchinson Award "for dedication and excellence in teaching," awarded annually to one SEAS professor. Also in 2005 he was voted "most engaging lecturer" in SEAS by the Engineering Student Council. His book is "Fighting Traffic; The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City," was published by MIT Press in 2008.
Cotten Seiler
Professional Experience:
2008-present: Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies, Dickinson College, Carlisle,
Pennsylvania.
2002-2008: Assistant Professor of American Studies, Dickinson College.
2007: Fulbright Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies, Hong Kong University.
1994-2002: Instructor in American Studies, Sociology, and Humanities, University of Kansas.
Education:
Ph.D. with Honors, American Studies Program, University of Kansas, 2002.
B.A. in English/Fiction Writing, Northwestern University, 1990.
Publications:
Book: Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Articles and Chapter Essays:
"Mobilizing Race, Racializing Mobility: Writing Race into Mobility Studies,” T2M (International
Association for the Study of Traffic, Transport & Mobility) Yearbook (Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Alphil, forthcoming January 2010): 261-268.
“The Significance of Race to Transport History,” The Journal of Transport History 28.2 (September
2007): 302-311.
“’So That We as a Race Might Have Something Authentic to Travel By’: African-American
Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism,” American Quarterly 58.4 (December 2006): 1091-1116.
“Statist Means to Individualist Ends: Subjectivity, Automobility, and the Cold-War State,”
American Studies 44.3 (Fall 2003): 5-36.
“The American Revolution” and “The Enlightenment in America,” The Columbia Companion to American History on Film, Peter Rollins, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 49-57; 153-160.
“Postmodern Fascism: The Intellectual Foundations of Contemporary European Anti-
Immigrant Movements,” Comparing U.S. and European Approaches to Issues of Immigration
(Clarke Center Ocassional Paper, Dickinson College, 2004).
“’Have You Ever Been to the Pleasure Inn?”: The Transformation of Independent Rock in Louisville, Kentucky,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 13.2 (Fall 2001): 189-205.
“The Commodification of Rebellion: Rock Culture and Consumer Capitalism,” New Forms of
Consumption, Mark Gottdiener, ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 204-226.
Georgine Clarsen:
Education:
PhD – History, the University of Melbourne, 1997.
MA – Women’s Studies the University of Melbourne, 1993.
B.Soc.Stds. – The University of Sydney, 1972.
Selected Publications:
Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)
‘Gender and Mobility: Historicizing the Terms’, in Mobility in History: The State of the Art in the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, Gijs Mom, Gordon Pirie and Laurent Tissot (eds), 123-28. (Neuchatel: Editions Alphil, Presses Universitaires Suisses, 2009).
‘Mobility in Australia: Unsettling the Settled’, in Mobility in History: (2009),123-28.
‘The Woman Who Does: A Melbourne Motor Garage Proprietor’, in Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture, Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (eds), 55-71. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
‘Machines as the Measure of Woman: A Cape to Cairo Automobile Journey’, Journal of Transport History, 29:1 (2008), 44-63.
‘A Fine University for Women Engineers: A Scottish Women’s Munitions Factory in World War One’, Women’s History Review, 12: 3 (2003), 333-356.
‘Still Moving: Bush Mechanics in the Central Desert’, Australian Humanities Review, February-March 2002, online journal,
http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR.*David N. Lucsko
David N. Lucsko is assistant professor of history at Auburn University, where he teaches in the Technology and Civilization sequence. He received his B.S. in the history of technology from Georgia Tech in 1998 and his Ph.D. from MIT—also in the history of technology, under the direction of Merritt Roe Smith—in 2005. From 2005 to 2010 he served as managing editor of Technology and Culture and taught history of technology, transportation history, and engineering ethics at the University of Detroit Mercy and industrial history at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He has consulted on museum projects in Massachusetts and Michigan, and he has presented his research at numerous conferences. His work focuses on the history of the automobile in the United States, with a broad thematic emphasis on automotive enthusiasts and the colorful underbelly of the American car culture. His first book, The Business of Speed: The Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915–1990 (Johns Hopkins, 2008), examines the business and culture of performance-oriented automobile modification or “hot rodding” in the United States. He is currently working on a book-length history of junkyards and the re-use, recycling, and re-purposing of automobile parts.
Correct mailing and e-mail address for each participant:
Peter NortonAssistant ProfessorDepartment of Science, Technology and SocietySchool of Engineering and Applied ScienceUniversity of VirginiaP.O. Box 400744Charlottesville VA 22904-4744434-243-8794 norton@virginia.edu
Cotten Seiler
Dickinson College
P.O. Box 1773
Carlisle, PA 17013-2896
Office: (717) 245-1027; fax (717) 245-1479
seilerc@dickinson.edu
Georgine Clarsen,
Senior Lecturer,
School of History and Politics,
Facuty of Arts,
The University of Wollongong,
NSW Australia, 2522.
georgine@uow.edu.auhttp://www.uow.edu.au/arts/staff/UOW018790.htmlph. (612) 4221 3670
David LucskoDepartment of History310 Thach HallAuburn University, AL36849-5207dnl0006@auburn.edu334-844-4328
John A. Heitmann
Professor of History
University of Dayton
300 College Park
Dayton, OH 45469-1549
John.heitmann@notes.udayton.eduClay McShane
c.mcshane@neu.eduHistory Department Northeeastern UniversityBoston, MA 02115617-373-2660Fax: 617-373-2661
Short Biography of the Session Chair: John A. Heitmann
John Heitmann was awarded a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Johns Hopkins University in 1983. In 1984 he came to the University of Dayton, where he is now Alumni Chair in Humanities and a Professor of History. Heitmann has published widely in the field of the history of science and technology. In addition to his Scaling Up (Philadelphia, 1984), The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1830-1910 (Baton Rouge, 1987), he has published articles in Louisiana History, Southern Studies, The Gulf Coast Historical Review, Florida Historical Quarterly, The Catholic Historical Review, Labour History Review, and Automotive History Review. In 1998 Heitmann began to redirect his work to topics on the history of the automobile, the consequence of an immensely popular senior seminar and undergraduate offering entitled “The Automobile and American Life.” This work was the starting point for his The Automobile and American Life (McFarland, 2009). Current work centers on the history of automobile racing in America, 1885-1941. Heitmann is a member of the Society of Automotive Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of the History of Technology.
Short Biography of the Commentator: Dr. Clay McShane
Clay McShane is Professor of History at Northeastern University in Boston. He is the author of Down the Asphalt Path: American Cities and the Automobile (Columbia University Press, 1994) and with Joel Tarr of Joel Tarr, The Urban Horse: A History ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and The Automobile: a Chronology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publications, 1997). He is currently embarking on a history of the urban highway from Olmsted through Moses.
Audiovisual needs:
We will require a computer and projector for Powerpoint presentations.
