|
|
|
Reviews
The Carriage Trade
Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America
|
By Thomas A. Kinney
|
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 381. Illustrations, notes, glossary, essay on sources, index. $49.95.)
|
| The 2006 announcement of a new Honda plant for Greensburg, Indiana, buoyed state Republicans during a difficult election year, raised the hopes of recently laid-off autoworkers, and provided Hoosiers in general with a chance to savor a $500-million-dollar victory over rivals Wisconsin and Ohio. The new auto plant's advent may also have reminded state and local historians of South Bend's Studebaker Brothers. This firm's long history of manufacturing first carriages and then automobiles gains new and timely currency in Thomas A. Kinney's fine new book, The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America. Kinney retells the Studebaker story and places it within the wider history of American transportation and manufacturing. |
1
|
|
Kinney's first chapter surveys the many changes that carriage manufacturing and marketing underwent from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, when automobiles began to displace horse-drawn carriages. He follows with detailed accounts of carriage making before the Civil War, the industrialization of the trade in the years that followed, and the complex relationship between vertical and horizontal modes of manufacture. In the former, manufacturers fabricated and assembled all parts of a vehicle; in the latter, independent suppliers provided manufacturers with parts, which the manufacturer then assembled into finished carriages. |
. . . |
There are about 491 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
