Automobile culture

GA 17 south of Thomson

I have spent the better part of six years thinking through a scholarly project about automobiles.  An historian by training, I have been interested in the way car culture shapes the larger culture.  As an historian of the American South, I have begun to think about the ways the automobile alter the southern landscape in ways that even southerners did not notice.  It is, however, only in the past year that I have begun to frame the work beyond my original thoughts.

 As a fan of NASCAR and a scholar of religion, I tried to find ways to think about how the sport uses religion (it is the only national televised sporting event that carries an invocation and the National Anthem live before each of its national series telecasts).  Part of the problem in the preceding six years is that I kept finding the traps in this kind of project.  I tend to find sports as religion arguments strained at best.  Anyone who wants to think of NASCAR as a religion can live in the infield at Talladega during a race weekend and notice that folks enjoy themselves without much in the way of ritual self-reflection. Last year, however, I was given advice to think more broadly about the automobile in culture.  With some administrative duties disappearing at the end of June, I have started thinking and researching more concretely about the subject.

GA 57 south of Gordon

Here is the working premise: if southerners emphasize "place," as John Shelton Reed has noted, then what happens when they adopt a technology designed to overcome place.  Mobility, as the car culture historians call it, means that we are no longer bound to our location.  Since few if any historians have looked at the way the automobile altered the South except in the way that Pete Daniel focuses on racing, I am looking at how the car became so vital for southerners.