By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.

    Even in Third Class, the accommodation was better than on First Class on many older ships. In the second volume of Titanic: The Ship Magnificent, for the first time, Bruce Beveridge, Steve Hall, Scott Andrews, Daniel Klistorner and Art Braunschweiger look at the ship itself, and at her interior design and fittings. From cobalt blue Spode china and Elkington plate silverware in the a la carte restaurant to the design of the boilers and fixtures and fittings onboard the world's most luxurious vessel, they tell the story of a liner built at the peak of the race between the British, French and Germans to build bigger and better ships.

    The opening of the pioneering Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 marked the beginning of the railways’ vital role in changing the face of Britain. Fire and Steam celebrates the vision and determination of the ambitious Victorian pioneers who developed this revolutionary transport system and the navvies who cut through the land to enable a country-wide network to emerge. The rise of the steam train allowed goods and people to circulate around Britain as never before, stimulating the growth of towns and industry, as well many of the facets of modern life, from fish and chips to professional football. From the early days of steam to electrification, via the railways’ magnificent contribution in two world wars, the checkered history of British Rail, and the buoyant future of the train, Fire and Steam examines the social and economical importance of the railway and how it helped to form the Britain of today.

    This book explores the organisation's pioneering role as Britain's greatest patron of poster art, a unique role developed in the early twentieth century under the visionary leadership of Frank Pick. The selected artworks and posters, many published here for the first time, reflect a dazzling variety of period styles and techniques, produced by an extraordinary range of artists and designers attracted by the Underground's world-wide reputation. The resulting legacy includes works by practitioners as diverse as John Hassall, Edward McKnight Kauffer, Laura Knight, Man Ray, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Abram Games, William Roberts, Howard Hodgkin and David Shrigley.Drawing on newly researched sources in the archives of London Transport Museum and Transport for London, this book discusses and illustrates the different styles and themes emerging from the posters over the last hundred years. These include the contrasting approaches of commercial graphic designers and the group of modernist avant-garde artists commissioned by the Underground in the 1920s and 1930s; the use of posters to support the expansion of the Tube by attracting new audiences and selling an aspirational vision of suburbia; the important role of women in the development of poster advertising both as designers and consumers; the different uses of the transport poster during two world wars; the changing fortunes of the poster in the post-war period; and, the public view of posters from 1908 to the present day.More than 250 images are drawn from the London Transport Museum's collection of over 5000 posters and artworks, which represents the most complete graphic archive of its kind to be assembled by a single organisation over so long a period anywhere in the world. "London Transport Posters: A Century of Art and Design" is richly illustrated with examples of posters from all periods, and will be an invaluable reference book and visual resource for all those with an interest in twentieth-century design.

    The book highlights the dramatic events that touched the whole world: the blockade, the airlift, the uprising of June 1953, the construction of the Wall, stories of escape and espionage, and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Includes numerous pictures and a map.

    

    It also celebrates all aspects of the Spitfire legend.

    Designed by Sir Alec Issigonis back in 1948, this bulbous little creation was Britain's first mass-appeal car. By 1972 some 1.6 million were built. There were variants like the Morris Traveler (timber-framed estate) and the Morris Million (painted pink). For thousands of newly marrieds, or penurious students, it was their first car. It was also the kind of car in which the district nurse did her rounds. Martin Wainwright (who proposed to his wife over the gearstick of a Morris Minor) gives us a quirky and fascinating history of this quintessentially British car. You'll find everything from the post-70s vogue for restoring and rebuilding Morris Minors, to the alarming habit of their bonnets to open at speed and entirely obscure your vision, not to mention the esoteric photo exhibition devoted to abandoned Morris Minors on the West Coast of Ireland.