| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 244 words from this article are provided below; about 358 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture, 1900–1940. By David Blanke. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. x, 266 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1515-5.)
Americans have long celebrated the automobile's combination of speed and power, the exhilaration of driving, and the thrill of the open road—yet death and injury have always lurked beneath the excitement and freedom of the highway. Automobile accidents between 1900 and 1940, for example, took roughly two hundred thousand more American lives than did World War II. This reality, David Blanke argues in Hell on Wheels, added a contradictory and often emotionally tortured aspect to the work of the reformers, engineers, and concerned citizens who tried to reduce the slaughter on America's highways in the decades before 1940.	1
Reconstructing those cultural tensions in order to explain "how a democratic society came to terms with the accidental freedoms of the modern age" is no small task, and Blanke has skillfully drawn on a wide range of sources to piece together his story (p. 4). Perhaps the book's most notable achievement is its success in rescuing the hackneyed idea of an American "love affair" with the automobile and imbuing it with new analytical significance. Blanke presents a compelling case that the "love affair emerged as a shared visceral and intellectual acknowledgment of the freedoms of driving" (p. 185)—and that this love affair, in turn, greatly complicated reform efforts to improve auto safety.	. . .

There are about 358 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.