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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.
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 ...
Today we can hardly imagine life in Europe without roads and theautomobiles that move people and goods around. In fact, the vastmajority of movement in Europe takes place on the road. Travelersuse the car to explore parts of the continent on their holidays,and goods travel large distances to reach consumers. Indeed, thetwentieth century has deservedly been characteried as the centuryof the car. The situation looked very different around 1900.People crossing national borders by car encountered multiplehurdles on their way. Technically, they imported their vehicleinto a neighboring country and had to pay astronomic importduties. Often they needed to pass a driving test in each countrythey visited. Early on, automobile and touring clubs sought tomake life easier for traveling motorists.International negotiations tackled the problems arising fromdiffering regulations. The resulting volume describes everythingfrom the standardied traffic signs that saved human lives on theroad to the Europabus taking tourists from Stockholm to Romein the 1950s. Driving Europe offers a highly original portrait of aEurope built on roads in the course of the twentieth century.
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.
The coming of the railways signalled the transformation of European society, allowing the quick and cheap mass transportation of people and goods on a previously unimaginable scale. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the domination of rail transport was threatened by increased motorised road transport which would quickly surpass and eclipse the trains, only itself to be challenged in the twenty-first century by a renewal of interest in railways. Yet, as the studies in this volume make clear, to view the relationship between road and rail as a simple competition between two rival forms of transportation, is a mistake. Rail transport did not vanish in the twentieth century...
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...
Over the past ten years, the study of mobility has demonstrated groundbreaking approaches and new research patterns. These investigations criticize the concept of mobility itself, suggesting the need to merge transport and communication research, and to approach the topic with novel instruments and new methodologies. Following the debates on the role of users in shaping transport technology, new mobility research includes debates from sociology, planning, economy, geography, history, and anthropology. This edited volume examines how users, policy-makers, and industrial managers have organized and continue to organize mobility, with a particularly attention to Europe, North America, and Asia....
In The Logistic Revolution, Richard Vahrenkamp discusses the political and economic factors which have led to the rise of logistics in Europe in the context of the mass consumption society. Not only does he show the ascent of truck transport in the 1920s to satisfy consumer needs and the importance of the European motorway infrastructure for the development of modern logistics, he also sheds light on the dimension that freight transport has acquired in Europe and on the organizations that have been created in Europe to enable and facilitate cross border goods transports. Other than in the US, the national transport markets in Europe were initially uncoordinated. It was only in the process of European unification that transport markets for truck freight and associated logistics systems became Europe wide. This change was accompanied by the struggle between rail and truck.
From local bike-sharing initiatives to overhauls of transport infrastructure, mobility is one of the most important areas in which modern cities are trying to realize a more sustainable future. Yet even as politicians and planners look ahead, there remain critical insights to be gleaned from the history of urban mobility and the unsustainable practices that still impact our everyday lives. United by their pursuit of a “usable past,” the studies in this interdisciplinary collection consider the ecological, social, and economic aspects of urban mobility, showing how historical inquiry can make both conceptual and practical contributions to the projects of sustainability and urban renewal.
The technical problems confronting different societies and periods, and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this annual collection of essays. Volumes contain technical articles ranging widely in subject, time and region, as well as general papers on the history of technology. In addition to dealing with the history of technical discovery and change, History of Technology also explores the relations of technology to other aspects of life -- social, cultural and economic -- and shows how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.