Auto mechanics : technology and expertise in twentieth-century America
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Auto mechanics : technology and expertise in twentieth-century America
（Studies in industry and society）
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007
- : hbk
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Note
Developed from author's dissertation for the Hagley Program in the History of Industrialization, University of Delaware
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The history of automobiles is not just the story of invention, manufacturing, and marketing; it is also a story of repair. Auto Mechanics opens the repair shop to historical study-for the first time-by tracing the emergence of a dirty, difficult, and important profession. Kevin L. Borg's study spans a century of automotive technology-from the horseless carriage of the late nineteenth century to the "check engine" light of the late twentieth. Drawing from a diverse body of source material, Borg explores how the mechanic's occupation formed and evolved within the context of broad American fault lines of class, race, and gender and how vocational education entwined these tensions around the mechanic's unique expertise. He further shows how aspects of the consumer rights and environmental movements, as well as the design of automotive electronics, reflected and challenged the social identity and expertise of the mechanic. In the history of the American auto mechanic, Borg finds the origins of a persistent anxiety that even today accompanies the prospect of taking one's car in for repair.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Technology's Middle Ground
1. The Problem with Chauffeur-Mechanics
2. Ad Hoc Mechanics
3. Creating New Mechanics
4. The Automobile in Public Education
5. Tinkering with Sociotechnical Hierarchies
6. Suburban Paradox: Maintaining Automobility in the Postwar Decades
7. "Check Engine": Technology of Distrust
Conclusion: Servants or Savants? Revaluing the Middle Ground
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
