HST 344 Summer , 2010, The Automobile and American Life at the University of Dayton, Starting May 10, 2010

HST 344 -- Science, Technology and the Modern Corporation: The Automobile and American Life

Class Meeting: MTWTHF 10:40-12:05 p.m., HM 125

Instructor: John A. Heitmann

Office: 435HM (x92803).

Office Hours: By appointment

E-Mail: John.Heitmann@notes.udayton.edu

Home page: http://homepages.udayton.edu/~heitmann/

Blog: http://automobileandamericanlife.blogspot.com

Texts: John Heitmann, The Automobile and American Life.

Kevin L. Borg, Auto Mechanics: Technology and Expertise in 20^th Century America

Ben Hamper, Rivethead.

Grades: The final grade for this course will be based upon one Mid-Term Exam, (30%), Two Critical Book Reviews (40%), and Final Exam (30%). The grade scale is as follows: A 94 to 100; A- 90 to 93; B+ 87-89; B 84-86; B- 80 - 83; C+ 77-79; C 74-76; C- 70-73. A similar pattern applies to lower grades. Letter grades are assigned a mid-point numerical grade. Additionally, attendance can influence your final grade at my discretion: if you miss more than 2 classes, one letter grade will be deducted from your grade; if you miss more than 4 classes, a two letter grade reduction will take place. Grade averages may be influenced by such factors as trends over the time of the course; for example, how you finish is far more important than how you start. Policies for exams strictly follows History Department Guidelines, and make-ups will only be offered with a valid, documented excuse.

Critical Book Reviews: Three critical reviews of assigned books serve as integral assignments in this course. Each review should be 3-5 pages in length, typed, double spaced. One should aim to critically summarize the book, aiming sure to discuss the authors content, themes, and perspectives, and then also provide an introspective response to the book that incorporates one’s own evaluation of the work’s authenticity and value.

Attendance at lectures is crucial if you are to expect a good grade in the course, and I want you to be at every class if that is at all possible. On many occasions material presented is not covered in the readings, and so many of the ideas discussed central to the development of modern science are complex and often confusing. Your attitude and what you bring in to the classroom can make the difference between a mediocre offering and a most positive educational experience.

Cheating and plagiarism will not be tolerated and offenses will be punished accordingly. A first offense will result in a failing grade for the exam or paper in question; a second offense will result in a failing grade for the course.

Course Purpose: It has been said that the automobile is the perfect technological symbol of American culture, a tangible expression of our quest to level space, time and class, and a reflection of our restless mobility, social and otherwise. In this course we will explore together the place of the automobile in American life, and how it transformed business, life on the farm and in the city, the nature and organization of work, leisure time, and the arts. This is a most complex transition that we will study, as the automobile transformed everyday life and the environment in which we operate. It influenced the foods we eat; music we listen to; risks we take; places we visit; errands we run; emotions we feel; movies we watch; stress we endure; and, the air we breathe.

SCHEDULE OF LECTURES AND ASSIGNMENTS

The week of:

Week 1/May 10 Introduction; What our cars tell us about ourselves. The car in everyday life: the automobile age and its contradictions. Automotive Pioneers; Putting America on the Road; Henry Ford and the Model T; The Rise of General Motors; “Master Hands.”

Reading: Heitmann, .Introduction, Chapter 1-3.

Films: “Wild Wheels”; “Horatio’s Drive;” “Automobile Parade;” “Gussle’s Day of Rest”

Week 2/May 17 Advertising, Styling, Design and the Art of the Automobile

On the Road;

Reading: Heitmann, chapter 4.

Film: “Grapes of Wrath;” “Route 66;" “Detour.”

Review of Borg's Auto Mechanics is due on May 21

Week 3/May 24 Religion, Sex, and The car as a Home

Reading: Heitmann, Chapter 5

Film: “Automobile Advertising 1910-1940;” “Thelma and Louise”; “Motorcycle Diaries”

Mid-Term Exam is May 28

Week 4/ June 1 The Interwar Years: The Great Depression, Aerodynamics, and Cars of the Olympian Age

Readings: Heitmann, Chapter 6.

Films: “The Crowd Roars;” “Burn Em’Up Barnes.”

Week 5/ June 7 World War II: Detroit, the Arsenal of Democracy; The Post War Industry and Technological Suppression; Chrome Dreams of the 1950s

Readings: Heitmann, Chapters 7-8.

Film: “Jitterbugs;” "Tucker;" "Rebel Without a Cause;" "Thunder Road;" "American Graffiti;"“Goldfinger;” “Thunderball” “Bullitt.”

June 11 Review of Ben Hamper's Rivethead is due

Week / 6 June 14 Oil Shock I: Japan, James Bond, and Mobile Lovemaking; The Automobile World Upside Down, 1980s to the Present.

Readings: Heitmann, Chapters 9-10, Epilogue.

Films: “Gone in Sixty Seconds.” “Fast and Furious;” “The Bourne Identity.”

Final Exam, Friday 18 June, 10-11:50 a.m.

Friday Night Cruise-In, Kettering/Dayton, April 30, 2010 -- what a beautiful evening!!

Mike and Mike Landry with their 1971 VW Karmann-Ghia
A nice early TR3 set up for racing
Headlight from a custom Ford Hot Rod
Dash from a 1936 Packard 12


Hi folks -- finally the long winter is over and we had a Friday night without rain! And the cars came out, but the hundreds, although with grandpas and grandmas, young children, and 60 year- old geezers like me. It was warm and brilliantly sunny, a perfect evening for a top down ride as well. I only have a few photos to share this time around, but more will be posted with each successive week.
This is an event that has no class, age, race, or gender, barriers -- as all who attend have one interest, namely a love affair with the automobile.

Laura Bush, her fatal accident, a Corvair and an Impala -- her story from "Spoken from the Heart"

Hi folks -- thanks to former colleague Ed Garten for the idea. I have always like Laura Bush. She seems practical, kind, and open, and not the shrewish kind of woman so often married to politicians. But then George W. was not that much of a calculating, overly ambitious politican.



In the near future, Laura is coming out with her book, and in it she discusses what had to be one of the most difficult times in her life as an adolescent -- the involvement in an accident that was her fault that killed a fellow high school classmate. Yes, it is important to note that it doubtful that design flaw in the Corvair had anything at all to do with this accident. We try to blame technology, perhaps in an effort to soothe our souls, but in fact I doubt that the Corvair's sway bar design had anything to do with what transpired. To be sure, virtually any car of the early 1960s was far from what we would deem safe by today's standards -- seat belts, ABS, crumple zones, etc. We know that Laura was thrown from her car, but I do not know whether or not that car was equipped with seat belts. Let's face it, young drivers get it trouble, and that is what happened with Laura, as she was distracted by her conversation with a passenger.



The bigger point here is not to point fingers at either the Corvair or Laura, but to understand that as much as there are people who have a love affair with cars, there is also a flip side, one in which the car can be seen as hell on wheels, to use the title from David Blanke's recent book on auto accidents and American culture. Accidents, especially the horrific kind, leave us numb and hurt inside, and with memories that are carried with us forever. And this is the case of Laura Bush, whose few fleeting minutes in 1965 are etched in her mind to this day. Obviously, Laura came out of this with a sensitivity for others, as is exemplified in her open heart.



See account from her book:

“In those awful seconds, the car door must have been flung open by the impact and my body rose in the air until gravity took over and I was pulled, hard and fast, back to earth,” she says. “The whole time,” she adds later, “I was praying that the person in the other car was alive. In my mind, I was calling ‘Please, God. Please, God. Please, God,’ over and over and over again.”

“It was sporty and sleek, and it was also the car that Ralph Nader made famous in his book Unsafe at Any Speed,” she states. “He claimed the car was unstable and prone to rollover accidents. A few years later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration went so far as to investigate the Corvair’s handling, but it didn’t reach the same grim conclusions. I was driving my dad’s much larger and heavier Chevy Impala. But none of that would ever ease the night of November 6. Not for me, and never for the Douglases.”

A Select Bibliography of the History of Automobile in America, Books: F-M

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Finkelstein, Norman H. The Way Things Never Were: The Truth About the “Good Old Days” New York: Atheneum, 1999.

Flink, James J. America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970.

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Ford, Henry. My Life and Work. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922.

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Foster, Kit. The Stanley Steamer: America’s Legendary Steam Car. Kingfield, ME: Stanley Museum, 2004.

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Gartman, David. Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design. London: Routledge, 1994.

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Georgano, Nick. Art of the American Automobile: The Greatest Stylists and Their Work. New York: Smithmark, 1995.

Gladding, Effie Price. Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway. New York: Brentano’s, 1915.

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Granatelli, Anthony (Andy). They Call Me Mister 500. Chicago: Henry Regency, 1969.

Greenleaf, William. Monopoly on Wheels: Henry Ford and the Selden Patent Suit. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961.

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Keene, Carolyn. The Secret of the Old Clock. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 2007.

Keyser, Michael. French Kiss With Death: Steve McQueen and the Making of Lemans: The man—the Race—the Cars—the Movie. Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1999.

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Kirsch, David. The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

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Laban, Brian. Cars: The Early Years. Köln: Könemann, 2000.

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Madsen, Axel. The Deal Maker: How William C. Durant Made General Motors. New York: Wiley, 1999.

Mantle, Jonathan. Car Wars: Fifty Years of Greed, Treachery, and Skulduggery in the Global Marketplace. New York: Arcade, 1995.

March, Peter and Peter Collett. Driving Passion: The Psychology of the Car. Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1987.

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Marquis, Samuel S. Henry Ford: An Interpretation. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1923.

Massey, Beatirice Larned. It Might Have Been Worse: A Motor Trip from Coast to Coast. San Francisco: Harr Wagner, 1920.

Maxim, Hiram Percy. Horseless Carriage Days. New York: Dover, 1962.

May, George W. Charles E. Duryea Automaker. Chillicothe, IL: River Beach Publishing, 1996.

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McCallum, Iain. Blood Brothers: Hiram and Hudson Maxim; Pioneers of Modern Warfare. London: Chatham, 1999.

McCalley, Bruce W. Model T Ford: The Car that Changed the World. Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 1994.

McKeon, Elizabeth and Linda Everett. Cinema Under the Stars: America’s Love Affair with the Drive-In Movie Theater. Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 1998.

McNichol, Dan. The Roads that Built America: The Incredible Story of the U.S. Interstate System. New York: Sterling, 2006.

McShane, Clay. Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Madden, W. C. Haynes-Apperson and America’s First Practical Automobile: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.

Marcantonio, Alfred, David Abbot, and John O’Driscoll. Is the Bug Dead? The Great Beetle Ad Campaign. New York: Stewart, 1983.

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Monkkonen, Eric H. America Becomes Urban: the Development of U.S. Cities and Towns 1780-1980. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.

Moorehouse, H. F. Driving Ambitions: An Analysis of the American Hot Rod Enthusiasm. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.

Morales, Rebecca. Flexible Production: Restructuring the International Automobile Industry. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1994.

Moses, Sam. Fast Guys, Rich Guys and Idiots: A Racing Odyssey on the Border of Obsession. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Mueller, Mike. The American Pickup Truck. Osceola, WI: MBI, 1999.

Muir, John and Tosh Gregg. How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. Santa Fe, NM: John Muir Publications, 16th ed., 1995.

A Brief Review of Jason Vuic's The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History

hi folks -- Jason Vuic and Hill and Wang publishers were thoughtful enough to send me a copy of Jason's The Yugo this week, and I quickly devoured it despite the fact that I had papers to grade. Our knowledge of the history of the automobile in general post 1960 is rather meager, and this work greatly adds to a very slim amount of good history on this period and subject. the post 1960 era is clearly a weakness that I perceive is in my book The Automobile and American Life, although my work does a better job than most surveys regarding the recent past, especially culturally.

What I found most interesting in this book was how Vuic set the broad historical context for a study that is primarily about a car. He does an excellent job in placing this story in Eastern Europe -- with accompanying tales concerning both America and Italy as need be -- into the narrative. Until I read the book, I really knew nothing about Malcolm Bricklin and his various schemes associated with the auto industry that led up to the importation of the Yugo into the United States by the mid-1980s. Bricklin was a car guy, entrepreneur, projector, snake oil salesman, and fraud all rolled into one. But he was also a visionary and idealist, who was one of a number of automobile industry outliers who attempted to break into a U.S. market that was dominant ed by the Big Three and a handful of foreign manufacturers after 1970. Bricklin seemingly never quite got it that "the devil is in the details," and that positive thinking can take you only so far.

The Yugo is at times remarkably funny, and I appreciated the humor, although it was at the expense of those sorry consumers who took a chance at a car that was clearly not adequate for the American market and consumer preferences and expectations. But at times, the narrative devolved into a discourse hat you might expect more in an "Introduction the Modern Europe" undergraduate history class, and I found it important to understand this background material.

My criticisms are few. I really wanted for the author to get behind the wheel of one of the surviving cars, and take it for a spin! And that never happened. People in East Germany love the Trabant, but I did not sense that the same emotions are true fore Yugo. Why? And finally, I never had a sense after finishing the book that the question of "was this car the worst ever" not answered to my satisfaction.

What I want to do now is talk to a Yugo owner and drive a Yugo, so that I can make up my mind beyond knowledge gained from a book. Cross country in a Yugo through the desert this summer? I doubt I am that bold!

Hyundai Eon

Hyundai Eon

Hyundai Eon

Eon is the smallest car ever made by Hyundai. It's a compact car with 772 kg weight, it measures 3.49 m long, 1.50 m high and 1.55 wide.

Inside, the car can be equipped with air conditioning, power steering, electric windows and mirrors, Bluetooth connectivity, height adjustable steering wheel, fog lights and airbag for the driver, items such as ABS brakes and stability control will not be part of the Hyundai Eon.
The small car will have an engine with 56 hp and 800 cm3, is notable for low fuel consumption, 1 liter of gasoline every 21km.

Hyundai Eon interior