In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

179 Notes INTRODUCTION. PARK AT YOUR OWN RISK 1. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Driven,” Qui Parle 13 (Fall–Winter 2001): 138. 2. Sarah S. Lochlann Jain, “‘Dangerous Instrumentality’: The Bystander as a Subject in Automobility,” Cultural Anthropology 19 (February 2004): 61. 3. Guillermo Giucci, The Cultural Life of the Automobile: Roads to Modernity, trans. Anne Mayagoitia and Debra Nagao (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), xi–xiv; John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000). 4. James J. Flink and John B. Rae, leading automotive historians of the past generation, do not specifically mention auto theft. Professor Flink, however, did touch on broader themes cogent to the story. In his America Adopts the Automobile , 1895–1910 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), chaps. 4 and 6, Flink addressed issues of government response and regulation that are directly related to important thematic currents in this study. As it turns out, patterns related to auto-theft measures established at the birth of the automobile generally stayed on course for more than a half century, with unsatisfactory results. Ashleigh Brilliant, The Great Car Craze: How Southern California Collided with the Automobile in the 1920s (Santa Barbara, CA: Woodbridge Press, 1989), 42–45, 119. Brilliant’s work, largely overlooked for several decades before it was published in 1989, foreshadowed a transition that is currently taking place in the historiography of the automobile in America. Social and cultural history is increasingly supplementing the largely descriptive scholarship that is still favored by many auto history buffs. 5. Jurg Gerber and Martin Killas, “The Transnationalization of Historically Local Crime: Auto Theft in Western Europe and Russia Markets,” European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law, and Criminal Justice 11 (2003): 215–26; Philip Gounev and Tihomir Bezlov, “From the Economy of Deficit to the Black Market: Car Theft and Trafficking in Bulgaria,” Trends in Organized Crime 11 (2008): 410–29; Ragavan Chitra, “Why Auto Theft Is Going Global,” U.S. News & World Report 126 (June 14, 1999): 16. CHAPTER 1. “STOP, THIEF!” 1. Horseless Age, February 6, 1901, 37. 2. Horseless Age, May 7, 1903, 42. 3. “Locking Devices,” Horseless Age, January 9, 1901, 19. 4. Horseless Age, February 6, 1901, 37. 5. Ibid., 19. 6. Ibid. 7. On the “chauffeur problem,” see Kevin Borg, Auto Mechanics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 13–30. Edwin G. Klein’s The Stolen Automobile (New York: Lenz & Reicker, 1919) features a thief dressed as a chauffeur in an unlikely plot that ends in the recovery of the car and a chance romance. 8. Horseless Age 12, no. 3 (1903): xviii. 180 NOTES TO PAGES 10–14 9. U.S. Patent 928,824, issued July 20, 1909. 10. National Automobile Theft Bureau: 75th Anniversary, 1912–1987 (n.p.: NATB, 1987), 6. 11. Fred J. Sauter, The Origin of the National Automobile Theft Bureau (n.p., 1949), 3. On the history of the NATB, see Articles of Association of the Automobile Underwriters Detective Bureau (n.p., n.d. [1917?]). 12. “Allege That Police Work with Automobile Thieves,” Horseless Age, April 22, 1914, 619. 13. “Auto Insurance Growing in Favor,” New York Times, April 24, 1910, XX5. On the topic of auto insurance, see Robert Riegel, “Automobile Insurance Rates,” Journal of Political Economy 25 (June 1917): 561–79; H. P. Stellwagen, “Automobile Insurance,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 130 (March 1927): 154–62. 14. On the early history of the NATB, see National Automobile Theft Bureau. 15. Sauter, National Automobile Theft Bureau, 6. See Constitution and Contract Membership of the National Automobile Theft Bureau (n.p., 1928). 16. National Automobile Theft Bureau, 22. 17. “Two under Arrest Name Auto Thieves,” New York Times, January 24, 1914, 2. 18. For an excellent discussion on the history of car keys, see Michael Lamm, “Are Car Keys Obsolete,” American Heritage Invention and Technology 23 (Summer 2008): 7. 19. “Get $2,000 Payroll, Flee in Victim’s Car,” New York Times, September 27, 1925, 9. 20. Roy Lewis, “Watch Your Car,” Outing 70 (May 1917): 170 (quote), 168; “The All-Conquering Auto Thief and a Proposed Quietus for Him,” Literary Digest 64 (February 7, 1920): 111–15, with reference to Alexander C. Johnston’s article in Munsey’s Magazine (New York, 1920); “More than a Quarter of a Million Cars Stolen Each Year,” Travel, October 1929, 46. See also William G. Shepard, “I Wonder Who’s Driving Her Now?” Colliers 80 (July 23, 1927): 14. According to the Oxford English...

Share