Inventing Autopia

Inventing Autopia
Title Inventing Autopia PDF eBook
Author Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod
Publisher Univ of California Press
Pages 416
Release 2009-06-02
Genre History
ISBN 0520252853

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"Flat-out one of the most interesting books I've read in years. To say that a book about California might rank with Kevin Starr's Americans and the California Dream or Mike Davis' City of Quartz is dangerously high praise, but I think Axelrod's book may someday be in that league."—John Ganim, University of California, Riverside "Inventing Autopia thoughtfully weaves together planning and policy history with cultural history to great effect. It is sure to change our understanding of the ways in which Los Angeles not only grew and developed but envisioned itself in the era."—William Deverell, author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past

Speed Capital

Speed Capital
Title Speed Capital PDF eBook
Author Brian M. Ingrassia
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Pages 203
Release 2024-02-06
Genre Sports & Recreation
ISBN 0252055217

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How a speedway became a legendary sports site and sparked America’s car culture The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway marked a foundational moment in the history of automotive racing. Events at the famed track and others like it also helped launch America’s love affair with cars and an embrace of road systems that transformed cities and shrank perceptions of space. Brian Ingrassia tells the story of the legendary oval’s early decades. This story revolves around Speedway cofounder and visionary businessman Carl Graham Fisher, whose leadership in the building of the transcontinental Lincoln Highway and the iconic Dixie Highway had an enormous impact on American mobility. Ingrassia looks at the Speedway’s history as a testing ground for cars and airplanes, its multiple close brushes with demolition, and the process by which racing became an essential part of the Golden Age of Sports. At the same time, he explores how the track’s past reveals the potent links between sports capitalism and the selling of nostalgia, tradition, and racing legends.

The Sower and the Seer

The Sower and the Seer
Title The Sower and the Seer PDF eBook
Author Joseph Hogan
Publisher Wisconsin Historical Society
Pages 417
Release 2021-02-17
Genre History
ISBN 0870209493

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This collection of twenty-two essays, a product of recent revivals of interest in both Midwestern history and intellectual history, argues for the contributions of interior thinkers and ideas in forming an American identity. The Midwest has been characterized as a fertile seedbed for the germination of great thinkers, but a wasteland for their further growth. The Sower and the Seer reveals that representation to be false. In fact, the region has sustained many innovative minds and been the locus of extraordinary intellectualism. It has also been the site of shifting interpretations—to some a frontier, to others a colonized space, a breadbasket, a crossroads, a heartland. As agrarian reformed (and Michigander) Liberty Hyde Bailey expressed in his 1916 poem “Sower and Seer,” the Midwestern landscape has given rise to significant visionaries, just as their knowledge has nourished and shaped the region. The essays gathered for this collection examine individual thinkers, writers, and leaders, as well as movements and ideas that shaped the Midwest, including rural school consolidation, women’s literary societies, Progressive-era urban planning, and Midwestern radical liberalism. While disparate in subject and style, these essays taken together establish the irrefutable significance of the intellectual history of the American Midwest.

The Very Hungry City

The Very Hungry City
Title The Very Hungry City PDF eBook
Author Austin Troy
Publisher Yale University Press
Pages 481
Release 2012-01-01
Genre Architecture
ISBN 0300165803

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"This book explores how cities around the world consume energy, assesses innovative ideas for reducing urban energy consumption, and discusses why energy efficiency will determine which cities thrive economically in the future"--Provided by publisher.

Autopia

Autopia
Title Autopia PDF eBook
Author Peter Wollen
Publisher Reaktion Books
Pages 412
Release 2002
Genre Social Science
ISBN 9781861891327

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The reach of the car today is almost universal, and its effect on landscapes, cityscapes, cultures indeed, on the very fabric of the modern world is profound. Cars have brought benefits to individuals in terms of mobility and expanded horizons, but the cost has been very high in terms of damage to the environment and the consumption of precious resources. Despite the growing belief that a Faustian price is now being paid for the freedom cars have bestowed on us, we are none the less manufacturing them in ever greater numbers. Autopia is the first book to explore the culture of the motor car in the widest possible sense. Featuring newly commissioned essays by writers, critics, historians, artists and film-makers, as well as reprinting key texts, it examines the effect of the car throughout the world, including the USA, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, China, Cuba, India and South Africa. In this book the car is treated neither as a technological fetish object nor as an instrument of danger. Instead, it is examined as a hugely important determinant of 20th-century culture, neither wholly good nor an unmitigated disaster, and certainly endlessly fascinating. Contributors include Michael Bracewell, Ziauddin Sardar, Al Rees, Martin Pawley, Donald Richie and Peter Hamilton. Key texts by Marshall Berman, Jane Jacobs, Roland Barthes, Marc Auge and others."

Hold-Outs

Hold-Outs
Title Hold-Outs PDF eBook
Author Bill Mohr
Publisher University of Iowa Press
Pages 242
Release 2011-11-14
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1609380738

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This book examines the evolution of contemporary American poetry in Los Angeles, California.

Sand Rush

Sand Rush
Title Sand Rush PDF eBook
Author Elsa Devienne
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 329
Release 2024
Genre History
ISBN 0197539750

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An original approach to the iconic landscape of California--the beaches of Los Angeles--this book recovers untold stories of presidential jaunts, wild spring break celebrations, underground gay beaches, and engineering feats that enlarged the shores overnight. From the creation of a mini-Venice on the LA sands in 1905 to Baywatch's David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson captivating billions of television viewers worldwide in the 1990s, the book offers a comprehensive look at a landscape that is at once natural and artificial, but now under threat from climate change and rising sea levels.