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Highways & Horizons, front and back covers of brochure for the General Motors pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. [Prelinger Library]

Highways and Horizons

The Interstate Highway System created a national polity defined by circulation. To rethink the Interstates is to rethink the United States.
by Reinhold Martin via Places Journal on June 20, 2025
Black family posing with a car.

Cars for Freedom: SNCC and the Sojourner Motor Fleet

The fleet provided activists with reliable transportation in hostile and often dangerous environments.
by Travis White via Black Perspectives on January 13, 2025
Electric taxis, cars driven like carriages, moving through the streets of Manhattan in 1898.

On This Day in 1899, a Car Fatally Struck a Pedestrian for the First Time in American History

Henry Hale Bliss’ death presaged the battle between the 20th-century automobile lobby and walkers in U.S. cities.
by Chris Klimek via Smithsonian on September 13, 2024
A klaxon car horn.

A Loud Warning From the Past About Living With Cars

Klaxon horns, once standard safety equipment, disappeared from the roads after World War I. But the tensions they exposed about urban noise still echo.
by David Zipper, Matthew F. Jordan via CityLab on August 26, 2024
Grid Lock in New York City.
Exhibit

Traffic Jam

Car culture is so pervasive that many people take it for granted. This exhibit shows how history can serve as our “blind spot detection,” enabling us to see new possibilities for the future.
Old advertisements selling cars to women.

Driving While Female

Is the car our most gendered technology?
by Leann Davis Alspaugh via The Hedgehog Review on July 31, 2024
A drawing of a playground slide painted like a road.

What Adults Lost When Kids Stopped Playing in the Street

In many ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for grown-ups.
by Stephanie H. Murray via The Atlantic on July 29, 2024
Three women standing in front of a 1915 automobile with a suffragist banner hanging on the side.

How Women Used Cars To Fuel Female Empowerment

From a 1915 suffragist road trip to the “First Lady of Drag Racing.”
by Nancy A. Nichols via Atlas Obscura on March 20, 2024
Automobile with Maryland and Washington, DC, license plates, 1910
partner

Plate Tectonics

A brief history of the license plate.
by Miriam Pinski via HNN on March 5, 2024
The front of a large truck.

We’ve Hit a Grim Milestone We Haven’t Seen Since 1981. Why Can’t We Do Anything About It?

An irresistible trend took hold 50 years ago, and we’re all paying the price.
by David Zipper via Slate on December 18, 2023
Jack-o-lantern and calendar day October 31.

The Politics of Trunk or Treat

Nostalgia, idealism, and the policing of childhood.
by Paul Musgrave via Systematic Hatreds on October 31, 2023
Parking lot full of cars

The Tyranny of the Parking Lot

Finding space for cars has remade the built world. A new history uncovers just how much our lives revolve around parking.
by Ben Furnas via The Nation on September 7, 2023
Cover of "Driving Force" book featuring a traffic cop directing automobiles.

L.A. and the Birth of Car Culture

On Darryl Holter and Stephen Gee’s “Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City, 1900–1930.”
by Gary Cross via Los Angeles Review of Books on July 15, 2023
Crowd of campers in Stoneman Meadow, Yosemite National Park, 1915.
partner

The First Campgrounds Took the City to the Wilderness

“A camping area is a form, however primitive, of a city” —Constant Nieuwenhuys
by Martin Hogue via HNN on May 7, 2023
Route of Horatio Jackson's and Sewall Crocker's coast-to-coast road trip in 1903.

The Coast-to-Coast Road Trip is 120 Years Old

In 1903, a doctor bet $50 that he could cross America by car. The first coast-to-coast road trip in history took 63 days and cost $8,000.
by Frank Jacobs via Big Think on April 11, 2023
An NYPD police car on the parade route on 59th Street during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York in 2016.
partner

Police Cars Are a Form of PR — and the Message Is Always the Same

Police champions have long wielded new technology as a tool to project authority and legitimacy, while deflecting criticism.
by Jeffrey Lamson via Made By History on March 20, 2023
A police officer stands beside a crashed automobile, 1905. (Photo by Robert Alexander / Getty Images)

The Reckless History of the Automobile

In "The Car," Bryan Appleyard sets out to celebrate the freedom these vehicles granted. But what if they were a dangerous technology from the start?
by Paris Marx via The Nation on March 13, 2023
Black and white photo of pedestrian and vehicle traffic in Los Angeles

When Cities Treated Cars as Dangerous Intruders

To many urban Americans in the 1920s, the car and its driver were tyrants that deprived others of their freedom.
by Peter Norton via The MIT Press Reader on July 25, 2022
Hitchhikers sitting on a road, thumbs extended.

That Ol’ Thumb: Hitchhiking

A review of "Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us About Humanity."
by Mike Jay via London Review of Books on June 23, 2022
A 1921 card reading: For Safety's Sake, cross this way, not here, not this way. Quit Jay Walking

The Invention of “Jaywalking”

In the 1920s, the public hated cars. So the auto industry fought back — with language.
by Clive Thompson via Medium on March 29, 2022
Black and white photo of the 1940 Chevrolet half-ton.

The Rugged History of the Pickup Truck

At first, it was all about hauling things we needed. Then the vehicle itself became the thing we wanted.
by Jeff MacGregor via Smithsonian on August 17, 2021
A women with her hands on the car horn
partner

Her Crazy Driving is a Key Element of Cruella de Vil’s Evil. Here’s Why.

The history of the Crazy Woman Driver trope.
by Genevieve Carpio via Made By History on April 2, 2021

‘Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance’

An excerpt from a new book that explores the intertwined history of travel segregation and African American struggles for freedom of movement.
by Mia Bay via Boston Globe Magazine on March 25, 2021
A parking lot taking up an entire city block in Downtown Denver, Colorado.

From Chaos to Order: A Brief Cultural History of the Parking Lot

How urban planners and suburban shoppers responded when “the storage of dead vehicles on roadways” became a nuisance to street users.
by Eran Ben-Joseph via The MIT Press Reader on September 3, 2020

The 100-Year History of Self-Driving Vehicles

What the long history of the autonomous vehicle reveals about its fast-approaching future.
by Anthony Townsend via OneZero on August 3, 2020
A sign that reads "We Want White Tenants in Our White Community." Two American flags are on top of the sign.

Highway Robbery

How Detroit cops and courts steer segregation and drive incarceration.
by Jade Chowning, Erin Keith, Geoff Leonard via ArcGIS StoryMaps on June 8, 2020

Street Privilege: New Histories of Parking and Urban Mobility

How the history of parking in America highlights its societal inequalities.
by James Longhurst via The Metropole on April 29, 2020

Escape Route

How cars changed the lives of black Americans.
by Gretchen Sorin via Lapham’s Quarterly on February 12, 2020

Why Do Police Drive Cars?

Since the invention of the automobile, police have used the dangers of America's roads to justify their growing oversight of motorists.
by Jackson Smith via Public Books on November 13, 2019

The Hidden History of American Anti-Car Protests

The U.S. had its own anti-car movement, led largely by women, before the Dutch "Stop de kindermoord" movement of the 1970s.
by Peter Norton via CityLab on October 8, 2019

Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?

For a century, we’ve loved our cars. They haven’t loved us back.
by Nathan Heller via The New Yorker on July 22, 2019
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