| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 34.2

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| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 34.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

David Blanke. Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture, 1900–1940. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. 266. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $34.95.
Automobiles killed about a half-million Americans before 1940. Until recently, though, historians have found few signs of social distress. They were looking in the wrong places, however. In Down the Asphalt Path (1994) Clay McShane, examining local sources in New York, found outrage and even minor riots in the wake of motorized mayhem. Since then, attention to early automobile accidents has been growing slowly.	1
A recent contribution is David Blanke's Hell on Wheels. Blanke finds an "odd early response to auto safety" (p. 185), in which Americans accepted high collective risks because of a tendency to measure safety individually. Because of their "automotive love affair" (p. 3ff), Americans resisted collective approaches to safety, preferring instead to seek safety through a code of individual driving expertise.	. . .

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