Atlantic Automobilism

Download or read book Atlantic Automobilism written by Gijs Mom and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-12 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs ...

Download or read book Globalizing Automobilism written by Gijs Mom and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-08-07 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has “car society” proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.

Download or read book The Devil's Wheels written by Sasha Disko and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the high days of modernization fever, among the many disorienting changes Germans experienced in the Weimar Republic was an unprecedented mingling of consumption and identity: increasingly, what one bought signaled who one was. Exemplary of this volatile dynamic was the era’s burgeoning motorcycle culture. With automobiles largely a luxury of the upper classes, motorcycles complexly symbolized masculinity and freedom, embodying a widespread desire to embrace progress as well as profound anxieties over the course of social transformation. Through its richly textured account of the motorcycle as both icon and commodity, The Devil’s Wheels teases out the intricacies of gender and class in the Weimar years.

Download or read book Automotive Empire written by Andrew Denning and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Automotive Empire, Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organized colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole. European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pressures of constructing and maintaining roads rendered colonial administration thin, ineffective, and capricious. Automotive empire emerged as the European solution to the transport problem, but revealed weakness as much as it extended power. As Automotive Empire reveals, motor vehicles and roads seemed the ideal solution to the colonial transport problem. They were cheaper and quicker to construct than railroads, overcame the environmental limitations of rivers, and did not depend on the recruitment and supervision of African porters. At this pivotal moment of African colonialism, when European powers transitioned from claiming territories to administering and exploiting them, automotive empire defined colonial states and societies, along with the brutal and capricious nature of European colonialism itself.

Download or read book A Vehicle for Change written by Éamon Ó Cofaigh and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-13 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Since its invention, the automobile has been systematically ‘consumed’, to become part of the fabric of twentieth- and twenty-first-century society, its impact and perception making the car an accurate gauge of changing cultural norms and values. As it grew in popularity, the automobile conditioned the very texture of modern life, and the particularly car-centred society of contemporary France is an especially apt locus for examination. The ubiquity of the automobile across all social strata provides us with a defined lens through which to examine the evolution of French society in the modern and post-modern eras. Taking the Second World War as a pivotal moment in recent French history, this book demonstrates how the automobile was both consumed and fetishized in distinct ways before and after this conflict. The ways in which society evolved from the pre- to the post-war period allow us to view French culture through the prism of the automobile as it embodied technological and social progress in twentieth-century France. The present volume seeks to explore and interrogate the processes of representation and mediation inherent in the evolving patterns of automobile consumption, and their subsequent impacts on local and national identity, framed by a detailed case study centred on France from the late-nineteenth century to the oil crisis of the early 1970s.

Download or read book The Electric Vehicle written by Gijs Mom and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hopes, as a new generation of electric vehicles becomes a reality, The Electric Vehicle offers a long-overdue reassessment of the place of this technology in the history of street transportation.

Download or read book Driving Modernity written by Massimo Moraglio and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.