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Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an "automobile utopia." In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the earliest days of the auto industry to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Paying particular attention to developments after World War II, Esperdy creates a narrative that extends from U.S. Routes 1 and 66 to the Las Vegas Strip to California freeways, with stops at gas stations, diners, main drags, shopping centers, and parking lots along the way. While it addresses the development of auto-oriented landscapes and infrastructures, American Autopia is not a conventional history, offering instead an exploration of the wide-ranging evolution of car-centric territories and drive-in typologies, looking at how they were scrutinized by diverse cultural observers in the middle of the twentieth century. Drawing on work published in the popular and professional press, and generously illustrated with evocative images, the book shows how figures as diverse as designer Victor Gruen, geographer Jean Gottmann, theorist Denise Scott Brown, critic J.B. Jackson, and historian Reyner Banham constructed "autopia" as a place and an idea. The result is an intellectual history and interpretive roadmap to the United States of the Automobile.
Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an "automobile utopia." In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the earliest days of the auto industry to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Paying particular attention to developments after World War II, Esperdy creates a narrative that extends from U.S. Routes 1 and 66 to the Las Vegas Strip to California freeways, with stops at gas stations, diners, main drags, shopping centers, and parking lots along the way. While it addresses the development of auto-oriented landscapes and infrastructures, American Autopia is not a conventional history, offering instead an exploration of the wide-ranging evolution of car-centric territories and drive-in typologies, looking at how they were scrutinized by diverse cultural observers in the middle of the twentieth century. Drawing on work published in the popular and professional press, and generously illustrated with evocative images, the book shows how figures as diverse as designer Victor Gruen, geographer Jean Gottmann, theorist Denise Scott Brown, critic J.B. Jackson, and historian Reyner Banham constructed "autopia" as a place and an idea. The result is an intellectual history and interpretive roadmap to the United States of the Automobile.
The "Happiest Place on Earth" opened in 1955 during a trying time in American life--the Cold War. Disneyland was envisioned as a utopian resort where families could play together and escape the tension of the "real world." Since its construction, the park has continually been updated to reflect changing American culture. The park's themed features are based on familiar Disney stories and American history and folklore. They reflect the hopes of a society trying to understand itself in the wake of World War II. This second edition expands its perspective in response to, among other things, the cultural shifts brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. New and updated chapters endeavor to hold Disney accountable: not accountability for misdeeds, but its accountability to include everyone, as American mythmakers and cultural titans.
The reach of the car today is almost universal, and its effect on landscapes, cityscapes, cultures indeed, on the very fabric of the modern world is profound. Cars have brought benefits to individuals in terms of mobility and expanded horizons, but the cost has been very high in terms of damage to the environment and the consumption of precious resources. Despite the growing belief that a Faustian price is now being paid for the freedom cars have bestowed on us, we are none the less manufacturing them in ever greater numbers. Autopia is the first book to explore the culture of the motor car in the widest possible sense. Featuring newly commissioned essays by writers, critics, historians, artists and film-makers, as well as reprinting key texts, it examines the effect of the car throughout the world, including the USA, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, China, Cuba, India and South Africa. In this book the car is treated neither as a technological fetish object nor as an instrument of danger. Instead, it is examined as a hugely important determinant of 20th-century culture, neither wholly good nor an unmitigated disaster, and certainly endlessly fascinating. Contributors include Michael Bracewell, Ziauddin Sardar, Al Rees, Martin Pawley, Donald Richie and Peter Hamilton. Key texts by Marshall Berman, Jane Jacobs, Roland Barthes, Marc Auge and others."
"Flat-out one of the most interesting books I've read in years. To say that a book about California might rank with Kevin Starr's Americans and the California Dream or Mike Davis' City of Quartz is dangerously high praise, but I think Axelrod's book may someday be in that league."—John Ganim, University of California, Riverside "Inventing Autopia thoughtfully weaves together planning and policy history with cultural history to great effect. It is sure to change our understanding of the ways in which Los Angeles not only grew and developed but envisioned itself in the era."—William Deverell, author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past
Presents essays on all phases of the American automobile industry and the effect of its product on individual lives and the culture of the society.
Film noir has always been associated with urban landscapes, and no two cities have been represented more prominently in these films than New York and Los Angeles. In noir and neo-noir films since the 1940s, both cities are ominous locales where ruthless ambition, destructive impulses, and dashed hopes are played out against backdrops indifferent to human dramas. In Urban Noir: New York and Los Angeles in Shadow and Light, James J. Ward and Cynthia J. Miller have brought together essays by an international group of scholars that examine the dark appeal of these two cities. The essays in this volume explore aspects of the noir and neo-noir cityscape that have been relatively unexamined, including the role of sound and movement through space, the distinctive character of certain neighborhoods and locales, and the importance of individual moments in time. Among the films discussed in this book are classic noirs Double Indemnity (1944), He Walked by Night (1948), and Criss Cross (1949), as well as neo-noirs such as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Klute (1971), Taxi Driver (1976), Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Cruising (1980), Alphabet City (1984), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Drive (2011), Rampart (2011), and Nightcrawler (2014). Uniting these essays is a thematic orientation toward darkness, whether interpreted in atmospheric and architectural terms, in social and psychological terms, or in terms of disruptive change, economic dislocation, and real or perceived existential threats. Offering multiple new perspectives on a wide range of films, Urban Noir will be of interest to scholars of film, media, politics, sociology, history, and popular culture.
Ten of the best articles in American history published in 2006 selected from over 300 learned and popular journals. Topics range from the general to the specific and cover all aspects of American history, from the early days of the republic through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are the questions that today's historians are asking.
How a speedway became a legendary sports site and sparked America’s car culture The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway marked a foundational moment in the history of automotive racing. Events at the famed track and others like it also helped launch America’s love affair with cars and an embrace of road systems that transformed cities and shrank perceptions of space. Brian Ingrassia tells the story of the legendary oval’s early decades. This story revolves around Speedway cofounder and visionary businessman Carl Graham Fisher, whose leadership in the building of the transcontinental Lincoln Highway and the iconic Dixie Highway had an enormous impact on American mobility. Ingrassia looks at the Speedway’s history as a testing ground for cars and airplanes, its multiple close brushes with demolition, and the process by which racing became an essential part of the Golden Age of Sports. At the same time, he explores how the track’s past reveals the potent links between sports capitalism and the selling of nostalgia, tradition, and racing legends.
Ukrainian-born journalist Vitali Vitaliev takes a journey around Britain in search of that most elusive of ideas - utopia. Laced with humour and trenchant insight, he reflects on utopian ideals in the United Kingdom and his own Soviet upbringing.