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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Seiler, Cotton. "Anxiety and Automobility: Cold War Individualism and the Interstate Highway System," University of Kansas, May 2002.
This dissertation disinters the foundations of a quotidian American act-driving the highway, at high speeds, usually alone. It argues that the Interstate Highway System was, at least in part, an attempt to affirm and reproduce the practices associated with the individualistic “American character,” at a time in which anxieties about that character’s decline enabled the performance of an idealized political subjectivity-a refurbished “autonomous individual” appropriate to the ideological climate of the cold war. Driving symbolically affirmed the combination of freedom and proscription that informed cold-war citizenship: A driver was “free” on the highway, yet also bound by the road’s vectors and imperatives. I begin my analysis by examining the transformation of individualism as a concept and doctrine. I argue that by the 1950s, individualism denoted teamwork, cooperation, and “fit” within an organization-the very antithesis of its 19th century articulation. Despite its altered meaning, however, individualism anchored American ideology during the Cold War. Chapter 2 begins with discussion of the postwar discourse on conformity. Autonomy found salient expression in automobility-a term which signifies the values and practices arrayed around the role of the automobile. The third chapter looks at the various ways in which automobility was encouraged-the most significant of these encouragements was the construction of the Interstate Highway System itself. I also examine here the rhetoric and imagery employed in order to “sell” the Interstates to the public. In the final chapter, I discuss the practice of driving as an analogue of citizenship, and identify the cues, and the markers of gender and race, which authorized drivers and citizens in this space of “limited access.”
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