The Automobile in American History and Culture: A Reference Guide (review)

The Automobile in American History and Culture: A Reference Guide. By Michael L. Berger. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Pp. xxviii+487. $100.

Michael Berger has compiled an extraordinary work, mostly an annotated bibliography, but with a short chronology and introduction to research collections. He annotates works by more than fourteen hundred authors, judiciously including literature by car buffs in areas where there is no well-developed professional literature. Selection and commentary are excellent. Berger's index is outstanding, an absolute necessity in a work like this. I ransacked this book with two other scholars looking for references that he missed, perhaps an unfair tactic, but in any event we found only two: John E. Miller, Looking for History on Highway 14 (1993), and Margaret Crawford and Martin Wachs, eds., The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment, and Daily Urban Life (1992).

Neither the chronology nor the guide to research sources have the same depth, but it is hard to imagine how they could without adding another two volumes. I would also have included some of the theoretically important works on the automobile by European scholars (but translated into English) such as Wolfgang Sachs, Henri Lefebvre, and Catherine Bertho Lavenir, although that might have been inappropriate for a work titled The Automobile in American History and Culture. Far more important however, is the failure to list websites of value to automotive historians. Here, let me depart from the reviewer's usual role and suggest some ways in which automotive historians can use the web.

First of all, there are numerous sites for individual companies, marques, and museums, easily found with Google.com or another good search engine.

The Making of America (moa.cit.cornell.edu/MOA/moa-main_page. html or www.umdl.umich.edu/moa/) contains digitized copies of virtually every nineteenth-century book or periodical in the libraries at Cornell University and the University of Michigan. Although the site does not always specify the extent of the collection, it is easy to search. More than six hundred thousand pages have been digitized so far, and the process has just begun.

American Memory, at the Library of Congress (memory.loc.gov/ ammem/amhome.html), an amazing collection of eighty thousand photos and early films and documentaries, is rich in automotive materials: the word "automobile" alone drew 2,659 hits, including a number of early films and songs and hundreds of photos. Searching can be awkward, though, because the collection is so big.

The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin (www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/historic_us_cities.html) contains many, but not all, maps from the U.S. Geological Survey and Automobile Blue Books before 1940.

At the National Archives, the Electronic Access Project (www.nara.gov/nara) is the best way into numerous U.S. government databases, including census data and statistics on economics, health, criminal justice, local government structure, and government spending. The Department of Transportation lists time series data on highway construction, traffic mortality, and the National Personal Transportation Survey.

Ad Access (scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess) is a collection of seven thousand advertising images from 1911 to 1950, mostly from the J. Walter Thompson collection at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History in Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. Thumbnailed and searchable, it is especially good for the Ford Motor Company—Thompson was Ford's advertising agency, and also kept "competitive" files on Ford's rivals.

The Digital Archive at the University of Southern California Library includes eleven thousand photos and selected maps from the Automobile Club of Southern California (www.usc.edu/arc/digarchives). Also valuable for the Golden State is California Air Quality Data (www.arb.ca.gov/aqd/aqd.htm), which contains an extensive database, developed by the California Air Resources Board, with information on major...