Atlantic Automobilism

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This book is a synthetic work of unique scope. It is the breadth of scope that, above everything else, sets it apart from all other syntheses... Mom has synthesized the scholarship of seven countries, with some relevant inclusion of about seven more...A trained engineer, a credentialed student of literature, and a policy expert with a long association with a national department of transportation, [have equipped him with] a breadth of expertise [that has made him] a pioneer of mobility studies, which rescues the history of transportation from narrower studies of artifacts and politics to contextually rich analyses." · Peter Norton, University of Virginia "Mom has put together a remarkable project with an exceptionally broad scope, in which he delivers timely and compelling analyses that will enrich how the rise of car culture in Europe and America is understood by scholars and lay readers alike for a very long time... The sheer scale of Mom's corpus is breathtaking, as he references books, newspapers, magazines, and other cultural artifacts spanning fifty years of cultural production in the US, UK, Germany, France and many other countries ..., [thus] conveying a careful, deliberate and nuanced understanding of an extremely complex chain of cultural processes." · Steven D. Spalding, United States Naval Academy Our continued use of the combustion engine car in the 21st century, despite many rational arguments against it, makes it more and more difficult to imagine that transport has a sustainable future. 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 to unearth the desires that shaped our present "car society." Combining social, psychological, and structural explanations, the author concludes that the ability of cars to convey transcendental experience, especially for men, explains our attachment to the vehicle. Gijs Mom is an historian of technology and teaches at Eindhoven University of Technology. A literary historian turned automotive engineer, Mom is author of The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age (Johns Hopkins 2004), founder of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M), and editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies (Berghahn Books).