This is a family album of the American automobile over its first hundred years: a scrapbook of the major and minor, the good and ghastly, the memorable and forgettable. Book designed to inform and entertain readers of every age in every land.

In Comeback, Pulitzer Prize-winners Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White take us to the boardrooms, the executive offices, and the shop floors of the auto business to reconstruct, in riveting detail, how America's premier industry stumbled, fell, and picked itself up again. The story begins in 1982, when Honda started building cars in Marysville, Ohio, and the entire U.S. car industry seemed to be on the brink of extinction. It ends just over a decade later, with a remarkable turn of the tables, as Japan's car industry falters and America's Big Three emerge as formidable global competitors. Comeback is a story propelled by larger-than-life characters -- Lee Iacocca, Henry Ford II, Don Petersen, Roger Smith, among many others -- and their greed, pride, and sheer refusal to face facts. But it is also a story full of dedicated, unlikely heroes who struggled to make the Big Three change before it was too late.

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.

Image archivist and transportation historian Jim Harter follows his work, Early Farm Tractors, with an even larger collection of images from advertising line art from 1880 to 1930, this time focused on Early Automobiles. Nearly 250 entrancing illustrations -- many suitable for framing -- are gems of the art of commercial engraving. Harter provides a very substantial, detailed history of the development of the "horseless carriage" into the brands famous from the early 20th century -- racers like Stutz, Dusenberg, Stanley, as well as those that became household names like Oldsmobile, Ford, Chrysler and others. Of special interest are the dozens of successful electric automobiles that flourished for 25 years. The history includes many colorful anecdotes about early long-distance races as well as interesting details of engineering breakthroughs. Full bibliography and index.

This book provides a comprehensive history of American print automobile advertising over a half-century span, beginning with the entrenchment of the "Big Three" automakers during the Depression and concluding with the fuel crises of the 1970s and early 1980s. Advances in general advertising layouts and graphics are discussed in Part One, together with the ways in which styling, mechanical improvements, and convenience features were highlighted. Part Two explores ads that were concerned less with the attributes of the cars themselves than with shaping the way consumers would perceive and identify with them. Part Three addresses ads oriented toward the practical aspects of automobile ownership, concluding with an account of how advertising responded to the advance of imported cars after World War II. Illustrations include more than 250 automobile advertisements, the majority of which have not been seen in print since their original publication.

On the morning of February 12, 1908, six cars from four different countries lined up in the swirling snow of Times Square, surrounded by a frenzied crowd of 250,000. The seventeen men who started the New York to Paris auto race were an international roster of personalities: a charismatic Norwegian outdoorsman, a witty French count, a pair of Italian sophisticates, an aristocratic German army officer, and a cranky mechanic from Buffalo, New York. President Theodore Roosevelt congratulated them by saying, “I like people who do something, not the good safe man who stays at home.” These men were doing something no man had ever done before, and their journey would take them very far from home. Their course was calculated at more than 21,000 miles, across three continents and six countries. It would cross over mountain ranges—some as high as 10,000 feet—and through Arctic freeze and desert heat, from drifting snow to blowing sand. Bridgeless rivers and seas of mud blocked the way, while wolves, bears, and bandits stalked vast, lonely expanses of the route. And there were no gas stations, no garages, and no replacement parts available. The automobile, after all, had been sold commercially for only fifteen years. Many people along the route had never even seen one. Among the heroes of the race were two men who ultimately transcended the others in tenacity, skill, and leadership. Ober-lieutenant Hans Koeppen, a rising officer in the Prussian army, led the German team in their canvas-topped 40-horsepower Protos. His amiable personality belied a core of sheer determination, and by the race’s end, he had won the respect of even his toughest critics. His counterpart on the U.S. team was George Schuster, a blue-collar mechanic and son of German immigrants, who led the Americans in their lightweight 60-horsepower Thomas Flyer. A born competitor, Schuster joined the U.S. team as an undistinguished workman, but he would battle Koeppen until the very end. Ultimately the German and the American would be left alone in the race, fighting the elements, exhaustion, and each other until the winning car’s glorious entrance into Paris, on July 30, 1908. Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, 1908 . . . The crowds gathering on Broadway all morning were not out to honor Abe Lincoln, either. They were on the avenue to catch sight of the start of the New York-to-Paris Automobile Race. There would only be one—one race round the world, one start, and one particular way that, for the people who lived through it, the world would never be the same. The automobile was about to take it all on: not just Broadway, but the farthest reaches to which it could lead. On that absurdity, the auto was about to come of age. “By ten o’clock,” reported the Tribune, “Broadway up to the northernmost reaches of Harlem looked as though everybody was expecting the circus to come to town.” The excitement was generated by the potential of the auto to overcome the three challenges most frustrating to the twentieth century: distance, nature, and technology. First, distance: in the form of twenty-two thousand miles of the Northern Hemisphere, from New York west to Paris. Second, nature: in seasons at their most unyielding. And third, the very machinery itself, which would be pressed hard by the race to defeat itself. Barely twenty years old as a contraption and only ten as a practical conveyance, the automobile couldn’t reasonably be expected to be ready to take on the world. But there were men who were ready and that was what mattered. —From Race of the Century

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.

This book is a comprehensive history of automobile workers in the pre-union era. It covers changes in the kinds of workers who staffed the auto factories, developments in the labor process and in overall conditions of work, daily life outside the factories, informal responses of workers to routinized, monotonous, and highly structured work, and automobile worker unions before the creation of the United Automobile Workers. Although the 1920s were seen at the time as a period of peaceful and cooperative labor relations, author Joyce Peterson looks beneath the surface to discover the many ways in which auto workers expressed their displeasure with and attempted to fight against working conditions. The book also examines the Briggs strike of 1933, the first strike to significantly register the impact of the Great Depression upon the automobile industry and to mark the end of the pre-union era. The automobile industry was a model of twentieth century mass production techniques, of managerial organization, and of labor relations. Studying automobile workers in their historical and social setting explains a great deal about the nature of modern industry—how it affects the daily life and work of employees and how workers see themselves as individuals and members of a working class.