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Bicycle—the machine that is perhaps most closely associated with our daily lives but the least understood since very few pay any attention to this constant companion. Bicycles have has a very colourful history and it has led to the development of many technological innovations, including automobiles. What is still less recognised is its contribution to some important social reforms, particularly women's freedom from the domestic confines. This article presents a short account of these developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the exhibition "Cars: Accelerating the Modern World," presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England.

It is estimated that in the years leading up to the Second World War, less than one quarter of USA women held driver's licenses. Due to the absence of data on women's automotive participation prior to 1963, what is known about the female motorist of this era is limited. While feminist historians have painstakingly recovered the woman driver through traditional research methods, there remains an absence of first-hand accounts of women's automobile experience. This paper calls upon the narratives of 21 elderly women to provide new insight into women's automotive history. These rich oral histories not only fill in the gaps about what is known about women and cars, but examined through the lens of Portelli's "living voices", reveal how automotive experiences affected women's lives in the past, and how the meaning of those experiences has been remembered and reconstructed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The appearance of the car in early twentieth-century Australia significantly re-shaped election campaigns. Political parties used cars to bring voters to polling places, and some voters took advantage of elections by making their voting contingent on these free rides. Politicians and other campaigners took exception to the cost of supplying cars and to the attitudes evident in demands for rides. Some saw compulsory voting as a way of forcing voters to provide for their own transportation. Introduced mostly in the 1920s, compulsory voting's impact was initially muted. But over time it did change how cars were used in Australian politics. One hundred years on compulsory voting remains in force in Australia, and cars are still seldom used on election day. This serves as an enduring example of how new technologies could have a disruptive impact on campaigning prior to the advent of radio and television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on how local photographers created a record of how the automobile changed lives through its development. Implications of photographs in the pre-automobile era; Recreational travel by automobile; Changes brought on by the automobile to the American landscape; Evolution of a new style of building automobiles.

Cities and their inhabitants were obliged to adapt rapidly to the rise of car ownership in the first few decades of the twentieth century; this article examines how one of New Zealand’s most developed urban centres, Dunedin, adapted to motor vehicles in the years 1901–30. Changes to the built environment are considered: new, specialised building types and commercial activities; the resurfacing and realignment of streets; and the introduction of traffic control measures. Social attitudes towards the changes in the use of public space brought about by motoring are also examined. In contrast to the hostility shown to early motorists in other countries, Dunedin attitudes appear to have been less overtly antagonistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses poets Frank O'Hara and Charles Olson and mentions their works and automobiles' history.

The article presents a report from a September 16-18, 2015 conference on historical shifts in automobile use in cities. Topics of presentations delivered included American influence on the planning of European cities, the history of West German urban planning in the 1950s and 1960s, and the development of automobile-centered infrastructure in Milton Keynes, England and Leicester, England.

Traffic safety, once neglected within the larger history of the automobile in the United States, has finally been getting the attention it always deserved. Nevertheless, historians still sometimes misappraise traffic safety in one era by the standards of another. A historical assumptions have contributed to misinterpretations--for example, that Americans of the 1920s were extraordinarily tolerant of traffic casualties because they did not respond to them as more recent traffic-safety paradigms would prescribe. As a corrective, four paradigms, approximately sequential, are proposed: Safety First, Control, Crashworthiness, and Responsibility. Historians are invited to borrow, modify, or replace them, and to consider their applicability to other countries. Whether these particular paradigms survive review or not, historians who are alert to safety paradigms will produce more reliable scholarship on the history of traffic safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the unusual opportunities for motoring leisure provided by the modernistic landscape of the Great West Road in the inter-war period. This suburban arterial road had become ribboned by new Americanized factories, which featured 'Californian' white elevations, floodlit at night. This modern roadscape, likened to the 'great white way of an exhibition' by John Betjeman, attracted leisure drivers who would cruise the new road, experiencing a sensation of displaced Americanization and modernity. Using David Nye's work on technological sublimity, this paper positions the Great West Road as a special space for driving as a new leisure experience, distancing this period from the exploration of the countryside that typified motoring in the previous decades. The paper uses material from motoring magazines, architectural sources and poetry to explain the nature of this sublimity through leisure driving. Not being California, the juxtaposition of wet British weather and this road could also provide a misty and mysterious driving experience. As the inter-war period drew to a close, some commentators saw this road as tawdry and vulgar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a fortuitous convergence of five articles on different automobile topics that probe the historical processes of creating, maintaining, and challenging sociotechnical environments. Gijs Mom, David Morris, and Stefan Krebs each explore aural environments in and around cars; David Lucsko and Christopher Neumaier study topics related to the broader environmental movement of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Bringing them together in this issue highlights the continued analytical richness afforded scholars through automotive topics, and points to a continuing vibrant and critical engagement with one of the most consequential consumer technologies ever developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the technological and cultural transformation of car audio from its World War II-era status as an aid to middle-class information efficiency through a process of fragmentation, including the development of "boom cars." These ultraloud sound systems, enabled by wartime innovations and postwar abundance, increasingly became indexes of opposition for those at the ethnic and economic margins of American life. Boom cars turned the perfected technology of hi-fi car audio outward into the streets, using sound to aggressively contest space and assert identity. These technological practices have been met with resistance from governments, continuing the centuries-long struggle for social power on the proxy battlefield of sound, and offering a template for understanding the possibilities and challenges of technological multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]