Auto-Opium

by David Gartman
Auto-Opium
Author: David Gartman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135094276
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This much needed book is the first to provide a comprehensive history of the profession and aesthetics of American automobile design. The author reveals how the appearance of the automobile was shaped by the social conflicts arising from America's mass production system. He connects the social struggles of American society with the organizational struggles of designers to create symbol-laden substitutes for the American dream. Theoretically sophisticated, lucid and compelling, Auto-Opium will appeal to all interested in the American obsession with the car.

Made to Break

by Giles Slade
Made to Break
Author: Giles Slade
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0674043758
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Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives, we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.

Grindhouse

by Austin Fisher
Grindhouse
Author: Austin Fisher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2016-09-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1628927496
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Examines, with historically informed nuance, the myriad routes of cultural influence that converged in the American ‘grindhouse’ phenomenon and its aftermath.

The Electric Vehicle

by Gijs Mom
The Electric Vehicle
Author: Gijs Mom
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1421409704
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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.

Big Disconnect

by Giles Slade
Big Disconnect
Author: Giles Slade
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2012-08-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 161614596X
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Smart phones and social media sites may be contemporary fixations, but using technology to replace face-to-face interactions is not a new cultural phenomenon. Throughout our history, intimacy with machines has often supplanted mutual human connection. This book reveals how consumer technologies changed from analgesic devices that soothed the loneliness of a newly urban generation to prosthetic interfaces that act as substitutes for companionship in modern America. The history of this transformation helps explain why we use technology to mediate our connections with other human beings instead of seeking out face-to-face contact. Do electronic interfaces receive most of our attention to the detriment of real interpersonal communication? Why do sixty million Americans report that isolation and loneliness are major sources of unhappiness? The author provides many insights into our increasingly artificial relationships and a vision for how we can rediscover genuine community and human empathy.

Car Country

by Christopher W. Wells
Car Country
Author: Christopher W. Wells
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 0295804475
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For most people in the United States, going almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is Car Country—a nation dominated by landscapes that are difficult, inconvenient, and often unsafe to navigate by those who are not sitting behind the wheel of a car. The prevalence of car-dependent landscapes seems perfectly natural to us today, but it is, in fact, a relatively new historical development. In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes readers on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing readers to see the everyday world in a completely new way. The result is a history that is essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48LTKOxxrXQ

Dream Car

by Dimitry Anastakis
Dream Car
Author: Dimitry Anastakis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2024-03-26
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 1487555857
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Dream Car tells the story of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s fantastical 1970s-era Safety Vehicle-1 (SV1), audaciously launched during a tumultuous breakpoint in postwar history. The tale of the sexy-yet-safe SV1 reveals the influence of automobiles on ideas about the future, technology, entrepreneurship, risk, safety, showmanship, politics, sex, gender, business, and the state, as well as the history of the auto industry’s birth, decline, and rebirth. Written as an “open road,” the book invites readers to travel a narrative arc that unfolds chronologically and thematically. Dream Car’s seven chapters have been structured so that they can be read in any order, determined by whichever theme each reader finds most interesting. The book also includes a musical playlist of car songs from the era and songs about the SV1 itself.

Handbook of Global Environmental Politics

by Peter Dauvergne
Handbook of Global Environmental Politics
Author: Peter Dauvergne
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1849809410
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The second edition of this Handbook contains more than 30 new and original articles as well six essential updates by leading scholars of global environmental politics. This landmark book maps the latest theoretical and empirical research in this energetic and growing field. Captured here are the pioneering and lively debates over concerns for the health of the planet and how they might best be addressed. The introduction explores the intellectual trends and evolving parameters in the field of global environmental politics. It makes a case for an expansive definition of the field, one that embraces an interdisciplinary literature on the connections between global politics and environmental change. The remaining chapters are divided into four broad themes – states and cooperation; global governance; the political economy of governance; and knowledge and ethics – with each section covering key emerging issues. In-depth explorations are given to topics such as climate change, multinational corporations, international agreements and UN organizations, regulations and business standards, trade and international finance, multilevel and transnational governance, and ecological citizenship. Handbook of Global Environmental Politics, Second Edition is a comprehensive review of the field and offers cutting-edge ideas for further research. As such, scholars, students and policymakers will find themselves looking to it for many years to come.

From Family Firms to Corporate Capitalism

by Kristine Bruland
From Family Firms to Corporate Capitalism
Author: Kristine Bruland
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1998
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780198290469
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What explains the growth of a business, and more broadly the development or decline of a whole economy? What role does a particular entrepreneur or indeed a culture of entrepreneurship play? Does the evidence suggest that a particular structure or organizational form was or should be adopted to ensure best practice and commercial success? These fundamental questions have long preoccupied business and economic historians. With the current expansion of business and management education and training, the investigations and findings of the historian may have wider significance and relevance. This volume has been stimulated by the work of Peter Mathias, one of the leading figures in this field in the post-war period. Here a number of his former students--many now internationally distinguished historians--pay tribute in a book that explores the move from family firms to corporate capitalism. The contributors argue that sustained growth has never been a matter of a few spectacular technical breakthroughs, but instead rests on subtle economic and social transformations--in cultures, in economic organizations, and in the roles of science and technology.