Download or read book Race Public Transit and Automobility in World War II Detroit written by Sarah K. Frohardt-Lane and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the decline of public transportation and rise of automobile use in the United States from the perspectives of social and environmental history. Through a case study of Detroit, the dissertation argues that World War II reinforced a culture of driving and set the stage for mass abandonment of public transportation in the post-war era. Even as wartime resource shortages exposed the vulnerabilities of car-centered societies, riders0́9 experiences on public transit and whites0́9 increasingly strong associations of streetcars and buses with black bodies worked against efforts to create long-term alternatives to private car use. Understanding the significance of World War II in shaping Americans0́9 mobility requires exploration of wartime transformations in everyday travel, as well as how government agencies and private corporations depicted these changes. The first part of this dissertation explores the effects of wartime resource shortages on Detroit0́9s public transit system. As buses and streetcars became extremely overcrowded, and service unreliable, racial tensions on board mounted. Public transit vehicles became common sites of racial conflicts. The second part of the dissertation examines automobility in the war and immediate postwar era. Government propaganda and private advertisements portrayed driving as fundamental to the American way of life and upheld the white male driver as a symbol of freedom for which the United States was fighting. At the same time, federal programs to limit rubber and gasoline use promoted driving as patriotic and essential to the war effort.
Download or read book Living Detroit written by Brandon M. Ward and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-03 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Living Detroit, Brandon M. Ward argues that environmentalism in postwar Detroit responded to anxieties over the urban crisis, deindustrialization, and the fate of the city. Tying the diverse stories of environmental activism and politics together is the shared assumption environmental activism could improve their quality of life. Detroit, Michigan, was once the capital of industrial prosperity and the beacon of the American Dream. It has since endured decades of deindustrialization, population loss, and physical decay – in short, it has become the poster child for the urban crisis. This is not a place in which one would expect to discover a history of vibrant expressions of environmentalism; however, in the post-World War II era, while suburban, middle-class homeowners organized into a potent force to protect the natural settings of their communities, in the working-class industrial cities and in the inner city, Detroiters were equally driven by the impulse to conserve their neighborhoods and create a more livable city, pushing back against the forces of deindustrialization and urban crisis. Living Detroit juxtaposes two vibrant and growing fields of American history which often talk past each other: environmentalism and the urban crisis. By putting the two subjects into conversation, we gain a richer understanding of the development of environmental activism and politics after World War II and its relationship to the crisis of America’s cities. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental, urban, and labor history.
Download or read book The Automobile in American History and Culture written by Michael L. Berger and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-07-30 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive reference guide reviews the literature concerning the impact of the automobile on American social, economic, and political history. Covering the complete history of the automobile to date, twelve chapters of bibliographic essays describe the important works in a series of related topics and provide broad thematic contexts. This work includes general histories of the automobile, the industry it spawned and labor-management relations, as well as biographies of famous automotive personalities. Focusing on books concerned with various social aspects, chapters discuss such issues as the car's influence on family life, youth, women, the elderly, minorities, literature, and leisure and recreation. Berger has also included works that investigate the government's role in aiding and regulating the automobile, with sections on roads and highways, safety, and pollution. The guide concludes with an overview of reference works and periodicals in the field and a description of selected research collections. The Automobile in American History and Culture provides a resource with which to examine the entire field and its structure. Popular culture scholars and enthusiasts involved in automotive research will appreciate the extensive scope of this reference. Cross-referenced throughout, it will serve as a valuable research tool.
Download or read book White Skin Black Fuel written by Andreas Malm and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the far right has done everything in its power to accelerate the heating: an American president who believes it is a hoax has removed limits on fossil fuel production. The Brazilian president has opened the Amazon and watched it burn. In Europe, parties denying the crisis and insisting on maximum combustion have stormed into office, from Sweden to Spain. On the brink of breakdown, the forces most aggressively promoting business-as-usual have surged - always in defense of white privilege, against supposed threats from non-white others. Where have they come from? The first study of the far right in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, and reveals its deep historical roots. Fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. None loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. As such forces rise to the surface, some profess to have the solution - closing borders to save the climate. Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up.
Download or read book Oil Culture written by Ross Barrett and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.
Download or read book Detroit 1967 written by Joel Stone and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers of Detroit history and urban studies will be drawn to and enlightened by these powerful essays.
Download or read book Power Moves written by Kyle Shelton and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2018-01-10 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since World War II, Houston has become a burgeoning, internationally connected metropolis—and a sprawling, car-dependent city. In 1950, it possessed only one highway, the Gulf Freeway, which ran between Houston and Galveston. Today, Houston and Harris County have more than 1,200 miles of highways, and a third major loop is under construction nearly thirty miles out from the historic core. Highways have driven every aspect of Houston’s postwar development, from the physical layout of the city to the political process that has transformed both the transportation network and the balance of power between governing elites and ordinary citizens. Power Moves examines debates around the planning, construction, and use of highway and public transportation systems in Houston. Kyle Shelton shows how Houstonians helped shape the city’s growth by attending city council meetings, writing letters to the highway commission, and protesting the destruction of homes to make way for freeways, which happened in both affluent and low-income neighborhoods. He demonstrates that these assertions of what he terms “infrastructural citizenship” opened up the transportation decision-making process to meaningful input from the public and gave many previously marginalized citizens a more powerful voice in civic affairs. Power Moves also reveals the long-lasting results of choosing highway and auto-based infrastructure over other transit options and the resulting challenges that Houstonians currently face as they grapple with how best to move forward from the consequences and opportunities created by past choices.
Download or read book Race against Liberalism written by David M. Lewis-Colman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2024-03-18 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race against Liberalism examines how black worker activism in Detroit shaped the racial politics of the labor movement and the white working class. David M. Lewis-Colman traces the substantive, long-standing disagreements between liberals and the black workers who embraced autonomous race-based action. As he shows, black autoworkers placed themselves at the center of Detroit's working-class politics and sought to forge a kind of working class unity that accommodated their interests as African Americans. The book covers the independent caucuses in the 1940s and the Trade Union Leadership Council in the 1950s; the black power movement and Revolutionary Union Movements of the mid-1960s; and the independent race-based activism of the 1970s that resulted in Coleman Young's 1973 election as the city's first black mayor.
Download or read book Detroit s Wartime Industry written by Michael W. R. Davis and published by Arcadia Library Editions. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as Detroit symbolizes the U.S. automobile industry, during World War II it also came to stand for all American industry's conversion from civilian goods to war material. The label "Arsenal of Democracy" was coined by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in a fireside chat radio broadcast on December 29, 1940, nearly a year before the United States formally entered the war. Here is the pictorial story of one Detroiter's unique leadership in the miraculous speed Detroit's mass-production capacity was shifted to output of tanks, trucks, guns, and airplanes to support America's victory and of the struggles of civilians on the home front.
Download or read book Cities in American Political History written by Richard Dilworth and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiling the ten most populous cities in the United States during ten critical eras of political development, Cities in American Political History presents a unique singular focus on American cities, their government and politics, industry, commerce, labor, and race and ethnicity. Cities in American Political History analyzes the role that large cities from New York to Chicago to San Jose, have played in U.S. politics and policymaking. Each entry is structured for straightforward comparison across issues and eras. The city profiles include basic data and statistics for the era and are accompanied by maps of each era and the largest cities at that time.
Download or read book The Myth of the Motor City written by Jacob Dean Hall and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because Detroit's government lacked the tax base to accommodate the city's rapidly growing population through its municipal welfare services, the city developed transportation problems, sewage problems, housing shortages, a deteriorating infrastructure, employment problems, increased racial segregation, and a sharp rise in the cost of living. The final two chapters focus on the political career of Josephine Gomon as Executive Secretary to the Mayor and as Detroit's first Secretary-Director of Public Housing to trace the attempts of her and others to maintain the city's commitment to municipal welfare during the 1920s and 1930s. Despite their efforts, when the Depression hit in the late 1920s and persisted throughout the 1930s, Detroit was forced to transfer most of its welfare services to state and federal agencies. The city's municipal welfare advocates lost their political influence in the process, marking the permanent decline of municipal welfare governance in Detroit. World War II and the post war boom temporarily revived the city's economy. However, it masked many of the structural problems that the city's poor and working class residents--many of whom were African Americans and working class mothers--were facing and the city's municipal welfare system had once addressed, setting the stage for the urban crisis that hit the city throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Mass Motorization and Mass Transit written by David W. Jones and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overview: The Killer Book of Serial Killers is the ultimate resource (and gift) for any true crime fan and student of the bizarre world of serial killers. Filled with stories, trivia, quizzes, quotes, photos, and odd facts about the world's most notorious murderers, this is the perfect bathroom reader for anyone fascinated with serial killers. The stories and trivia cover such killers as: John Wayne Gacy; Ted Bundy; BTK Killer; Jack the Ripper; Green River Killer; Serial killers around the world; And many more. Bathroom readers have enjoyed considerable success as a format, selling millions of copies. The Killer Book series brings this format to the rabid true crime audience. Including more than 40 black & white photos, this is a must for true crime fans.
Download or read book The Automobile and American Life 2d ed written by John Heitmann and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-08-03 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now revised and updated, this book tells the story of how the automobile transformed American life and how automotive design and technology have changed over time. It details cars' inception as a mechanical curiosity and later a plaything for the wealthy; racing and the promotion of the industry; Henry Ford and the advent of mass production; market competition during the 1920s; the development of roads and accompanying highway culture; the effects of the Great Depression and World War II; the automotive Golden Age of the 1950s; oil crises and the turbulent 1970s; the decline and then resurgence of the Big Three; and how American car culture has been represented in film, music and literature. Updated notes and a select bibliography serve as valuable resources to those interested in automotive history.
Download or read book Dave Bing written by Drew Sharp and published by Human Kinetics. This book was released on 2012-11-05 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What kind of person loses sight in one eye and then through dedicated practice and honed skills becomes one of the top 50 NBA players of all time? What kind of person, with limited business experience, builds a start-up company into a thriving corporation and is recognized as one of the world’s most successful black executives? What kind of person, while running a $350 million business, takes the time to reach out to black youths lacking father figures and provides counsel and support? And what kind of person, instead of enjoying a well-deserved luxurious retirement, chooses to become mayor of a large city that many long ago had written off as dead? Dave Bing, that’s who. In Dave Bing, Detroit Free Press sports columnist Drew Sharp chronicles the compelling story of a figure whose sheer will to succeed, refusal to make excuses for setbacks, and efforts to contribute to society set him apart as an anomaly—a man of virtues so rarely found in recent history. His path from Washington D.C. to Syracuse to Detroit is sometimes tumultuous, blazed by hard work, perseverance, and savvy. Much more than the stereotypical tale of celebrity ex-jock who does good, this is a story about a black male who, even as a youngster, determined to conquer whatever challenges came his way. And now, as mayor of Detroit, Bing encounters perhaps his greatest test of all. Faced with entrenched and power-hungry political foes, a series of failed and corrupt predecessors, a work force ill prepared for today’s job market, a staggering city debt, and recent health problems, Bing would appear to have little chance of surviving his office. Both the naysayers and optimists would do well to read the book.
Download or read book The Automobile Age written by James J. Flink and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1990-07-19 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping cultural history, James Flink provides a fascinating account of the creation of the world's first automobile culture. He offers both a critical survey of the development of automotive technology and the automotive industry and an analysis of the social effects of "automobility" on workers and consumers.
Download or read book Detroit Divided written by Reynolds Farley and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2000-05-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unskilled workers once flocked to Detroit, attracted by manufacturing jobs paying union wages, but the passing of Detroit's manufacturing heyday has left many of those workers stranded. Manufacturing continues to employ high-skilled workers, and new work can be found in suburban service jobs, but the urban plants that used to employ legions of unskilled men are a thing of the past. The authors explain why white auto workers adjusted to these new conditions more easily than blacks. Taking advantage of better access to education and suburban home loans, white men migrated into skilled jobs on the city's outskirts, while blacks faced the twin barriers of higher skill demands and hostile suburban neighborhoods. Some blacks have prospered despite this racial divide: a black elite has emerged, and the shift in the city toward municipal and service jobs has allowed black women to approach parity of earnings with white women. But Detroit remains polarized racially, economically, and geographically to a degree seen in few other American cities. A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality
Download or read book The Automobile written by and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 1558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
